Courses

We tell stories for many reasons: to entertain; to seduce; to complain; to think. This course draws upon the literatures and cultures of the romance languages to explore the role of narrative in our construction and understanding of the world.

Full details for ROMS 1102 - FWS: The Craft of Storytelling

What is a culture, and how do we know one when we see it?  This course draws upon the histories and texts of French, Spanish, Italian, and/or Portuguese speaking worlds to discuss issues of identity, difference, politics, place, and community.

Full details for ROMS 1108 - FWS:Cultural Identities; Cultural Differences

What kind of information do images - in photography, painting, and/or film - convey?  What kind of impact do they have on the minds and the bodies of their audiences?  This course foregrounds the role of visual culture in the societies where Spanish, French, Portuguese, and/or Italian is spoken, and it asks students to dwell upon how visual material interacts with spoken and written language.

Full details for ROMS 1109 - FWS: Image and Imagination

Some of the most important and intriguing thinkers, from the Middle Ages to postmodernity, have done their thinking in the romance languages.  This course explores a body of work that would be called philosophical by some, theoretical by others, and that, beyond these names, struggles to articulate fundamental concepts, problems, discourses, and situations.

Full details for ROMS 1113 - FWS: Thinking and Thought

In this class, students will learn about animal welfare and conservation through international films. We will discuss wildlife, companion, farm, and lab animals in conjunction with human cultures, politics, and geography. The course will cover various animal species in fiction films, documentaries, and animated movies. In some motion pictures, animals will be central, in other more peripheral. Students will learn how to compose a film review, assess sources, and write a critical essay. The class includes guest speakers and a field trip to Cornell Teaching & Research Barns. All films are digital for students to watch in their free time

Full details for ROMS 1120 - FWS: Animals in Global Cinema

When sugar "was king," that is, when it was valued in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as we might value petroleum today, European nations went to war in order to possess the sugar producing islands in the Caribbean. Sugar production, slave labor, and the transatlantic trade that they generated were crucial for European empire building and the creation of the enormous wealth that, in comparison with earlier historical periods, rapidly revolutionized agriculture, nutrition, industry, labor, and free trade; racialized Caribbean peoples; and gave rise to transatlantic debates on freedom, abolitionism, and humanitarian philanthropy. Readings include A. Stuart, Sugar in the Blood, S. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, C.L.R. James, Black Jacobins. Films include, Gutiérrez Alea's The Last Supper and M. Kalatozov's I am Cuba.

Full details for ROMS 3010 - Sweetness: How Sugar Built the Modern World

At the end of the Great War, Europe has became the realm of a new relationship between violence, culture, and politics. From 1914 to 1945, the continent became the realm of an extraordinary entanglement of wars, revolutions and counterrevolutions, civil wars, and genocides, which could be summarized by the concept of "European Civil War". This course will analyze some features of this cataclysmic time by engaging political theory, cultural and intellectual history, and by scrutinizing novels, films, and intellectual productions.

Full details for ROMS 3300 - The Culture of Violence: Europe 1914-1945

This course examines the works of major poets and artists from the Spanish and French- speaking Caribbean from roughly 1925-1945. During this period, two movements—Negrismo and Négritude—emerged, on the one hand, as anticolonial efforts at Black self-expression in the Caribbean and, on the other, as engagements with European avant-garde movements such as Cubism and Surrealism. We will examine canonical works by Luis Palés Matos, Nicolás Guillén, Wifredo Lam, Lydia Cabrera, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, Léon Gontran Damas, and Hector Hyppolite. Theoretical readings include Franz Fanon and Antonio Benítez Rojo. Reading knowledge of Spanish or French or both is recommended but not required. Students may write their papers in Spanish, French, or English.

Full details for ROMS 4151 - Negrismo, Negritude and Surrealism in the Caribbean

This course combines literature, film, and other artistic projects in order to explore African forms of collective justice and repair, following the numerous conflicts that have shaken the continent in the 20th and 21st centuries, from anti-colonial struggles to civil wars. We will look at aesthetic productions from post-independence Algeria and Ghana, post-apartheid South Africa and post-genocide Rwanda, among others, in order to reflect on multiple questions, including: How do aesthetic works and state institutions offer competing narratives of a traumatic past, and what ways of healing can they generate? How do they negotiate between the retributive and the restorative impulses of justice? Is justice sufficient for resolution to take place? And conversely, can repair ever be achieved in the absence of justice? For longer description and instructor bio visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for ROMS 4681 - Post-Conflict Justice and Resolution in Africa

This course offers students an engagement with Transatlantic literature through the notion of encounter. While this notion may sound neutral or friendly, it can nonetheless encode violence of many orders. Students will learn about the beginnings of globalization (1492-1700), the independence period (1791-1898), the avant gardes, the Latin American boom, and the 21st century. This course primarily focuses on Latin American literatures, culture, and history, but we will explore it in connection with the cultures and histories of Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. Students will also think critically about the kinds of encounter produced by: forced migration, resistance to colonial oppression, poems in conversation, literary works that challenge strict definitions of genre; intellectual disputes over the rights of telling the history of a people, etc.

Full details for ROMS 4750 - Knowledge and Power: Literary and Cultural Encounters in the Ibero-Atlantic (1492-2015)

Focuses on language teaching as facilitation of learning, thus on the learner's processing of language acquisition and the promotion of reflective teaching. Pedagogical approaches will be addressed from a learner-centered perspective involving effective language learning strategies and analysis.

Full details for ROMS 5070 - Methodology of Romance Language Learning and Teaching

This course combines literature, film, and other artistic projects in order to explore African forms of collective justice and repair, following the numerous conflicts that have shaken the continent in the 20th and 21st centuries, from anti-colonial struggles to civil wars. We will look at aesthetic productions from post-independence Algeria and Ghana, post-apartheid South Africa and post-genocide Rwanda, among others, in order to reflect on multiple questions, including: How do aesthetic works and state institutions offer competing narratives of a traumatic past, and what ways of healing can they generate? How do they negotiate between the retributive and the restorative impulses of justice? Is justice sufficient for resolution to take place? And conversely, can repair ever be achieved in the absence of justice? For longer description and instructor bio visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for ROMS 6681 - Post-Conflict Justice and Resolution in Africa

This course offers students an engagement with Transatlantic literature through the notion of encounter. While this notion may sound neutral or friendly, it can nonetheless encode violence of many orders. Students will learn about the beginnings of globalization (1492-1700), the independence period (1791-1898), the avant gardes, the Latin American boom, and the 21st century. This course primarily focuses on Latin American literatures, culture, and history, but we will explore it in connection with the cultures and histories of Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. Students will also think critically about the kinds of encounter produced by: forced migration, resistance to colonial oppression, poems in conversation, literary works that challenge strict definitions of genre; intellectual disputes over the rights of telling the history of a people, etc.

Full details for ROMS 6750 - Knowledge and Power: Literary and Cultural Encounters in the Ibero-Atlantic (1492-2015)

FREN 1210-1220 is a two-semester sequence. This is the second half of the sequence designed to provide a thorough grounding in French language and an introduction to intercultural competence. French is used in contextualized, meaningful, and critical thinking activities to provide practice in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Development of analytical skills for grammar leads students toward greater autonomy as language learners. Students continue developing their writing skills by writing and editing compositions. Readings are varied and include literary texts and a short novel.

Full details for FREN 1220 - Elementary French

FREN 1230 is an all-skills course designed to improve oral communication, listening comprehension, and reading ability, to establish a groundwork for correct writing, and to provide a substantial grammar review. The approach in the course encourages the student to see the language within the context of its culture.

Full details for FREN 1230 - Continuing French

This course is specifically designed for premed students and students at large with an interest in medical related topics who wish to be better equipped with language skills that will enable them to convey more empathy and multicultural sensitivity while communicating with diverse patient populations throughout the Francophone world.  This course aims as well to prepare students to engage in global health equity and promote awareness of language barriers in today's medical field, both domestically and abroad. This is a mid-intermediate level course, and as such, it will continue to develop and reinforce writing, reading, speaking, listening and presentational skills via an array of communicative tasks based on real-life situations.

Full details for FREN 2070 - Medical French

This intermediate-level course is designed for students who want to focus on their speaking and writing skills. Emphasis is placed on strengthening of grammar skills, expansion of vocabulary and discourse levels to increase communicative fluency and accuracy. The course also provides continued reading and listening practice as well as development of effective language learning strategies.

Full details for FREN 2090 - French Intermediate Composition and Conversation I

This advanced-intermediate course is highly recommended for students planning to study abroad as it aims to develop the writing and speaking skills needed to function in a French speaking university environment. A comprehensive review of fundamental and advanced grammatical structures is integrated with the study of selected texts (short stories, literary excerpts, poems, articles from French periodicals, videos) all chosen for thematic or cultural interest. Students write weekly papers, participate in class discussions of the topics at hand, and give at least one oral presentation in class.

Full details for FREN 2095 - French Intermediate Composition and Conversation II

This course, designed to follow FREN 2095, introduces students to an array of literary and visual material from the French and Francophone world.  It aims to develop students' proficiency in critical writing and thinking, as well as presenting students with the vocabulary and tools of literary and visual analysis.  Each section of FREN 2310 will have a different focus-for example, colonialism and the other, or the importance of women and sexual minorities in French and Francophone history, performance in literature and film, or image and narrative-but all sections of FREN 2310 will emphasize through writing assignments and in-class discussions, the development of those linguistic and conceptual tools necessary for cultural and critical fluency.

Full details for FREN 2310 - Introduction to French and Francophone Literature and Culture

This course designed to follow FREN 2095, introduces students to key cinematic techniques used in analysis of films and to major movements in the twentieth century French cinema.  Students will view a broad range of French and Francophone films spanning from 1945-2004 that includes canonical as well as contemporary works.  Topics studied include: the evolution of gender representation in French and Franophone films, the depiction of decolonization, and the films de banlieu genre.  The class will combine discussion, presentations, class scene analysis and readings from journalistic and film criticism tets, and will be conducted in French.

Full details for FREN 2320 - Introduction to French and Francophone Film

We live in an age of algorithms wherein seemingly every aspect of life can be broken down, measured, and even sold as data. But how did we get here? And where are we going? This course privileges literature as a unique lens for exploring our digital past, present, and potential futures. In it, we will leverage an array of literary forms—from experimental prose and poetry to science fiction—to renew our understanding not only of the relationships between writing and so-called information technologies, but of such pressing issues as algorithmic bias, automation, neocolonialism, and digital labor. Literary and theoretical readings include texts by Hari Kunzru, Georges Perec, Gilles Deleuze, Achille Mbembe, Antoinette Rouvroy, Bernard Stiegler, and Donna Haraway, among others.

Full details for FREN 3040 - Digital Texts: Literature, Data, Politics

In this course, both seminar and workshop, students discuss writing about translation, mostly in French, and practice translating from French to English.  The theoretical texts studied represent a variety of perspectives and the French texts translated, a variety of literary and non-literary genres.  Students will investigate ways of addressing various types of difficulties they encounter in the process of translating across languages and cultures with the aim of developing their own principled approach to translating.

Full details for FREN 3160 - Translating French: Theory and Practice

While the 17th century is extolled as the period of France's greatest cultural achievements (Architecutre-Versailles-, Theater, Painting, philosophy) as well as its military and political triumphs, we will explore the underside of these triumphs. Did the same social contract that aided these great works also contribute to religious intolerance (persecution of the Huguenots), witch hunting, the proliferation of poisoners, and the development of the infamous "Code Noir" which legalized and codified slavery in France's prosperous colonies (Haiti, Martinique, Louisiana)? We will read both some of the great literary production of the period as well as trial documents of witches, poisoners, religious tracts and, of course, the "Code Noir" to form a more balanced picture of the "Splendid Century."

Full details for FREN 3320 - The Dark Side of French Absolutism: A Study of Religious Intolerance, Misogyny, Murder and Slavery

This course is conceived as a critical introduction to a cultural and political debate that appeared in the years of Mitterrand's France and reached its climax in the last decade.  It will focus on a French society deeply shaped by immigration and globalization.  In which way do the youth of the "banlieue" - mostly formed by postcolonial Blacks and Muslims - create their own culture with the French culture?  How have literature, essays, movies, documentary films, "national identity" carried on by governments reacted to these transformations?  Selecting literary texts (by Maryse Condé, Zahia Rahmani, Adb El Malik) and other cultural productions, the course will explore the new expressions of France as an "imagined community".

Full details for FREN 3400 - French Identities: 21st Century Culture and Society in France

This course will introduce students to the relationship between modern fantasy fiction and the Middle Ages. What kind of world is the world of quests and secret love affairs, swords and sorcery? We'll begin with the two main models for adventure stories in medieval French literature, the Song of Roland and Lancelot, before examing how they appear in modern literature and film. Along the way, we'll consider more familiar exchanges between medieval literture and modern allegory in the work of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, and we'll ask what fantasy fiction allows us to fantasize about.

Full details for FREN 3775 - Future Past: Fantasy Fiction

The Second World War and the Occupation of France by German forces had a traumatic impact on the nation's identity. We will examine the way France has tried to deal with this conflicted period through a series of films that each deal, directly or indirectly with the major questions posed by history to French "memory" of the Occupation. What was the role of collaboration, resistance, anti-Semitism, of writers and intellectuals during this traumtic period? How has film helped to define and re-shape the ways in which France has come to terms with its conflicted past?

Full details for FREN 3840 - Occupied France Through Film

This course examines a range of exciting and provocative 20th- and 21st- century theoretical paradigms for thinking about literature, language and culture. These approaches provide differing, though often overlapping, entryways into theoretical analysis, including structuralism and post-structuralism, translation studies, Black studies, Afro-Diasporic Studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, performance studies, media theory and cinema/media studies, the digital humanities, psychoanalysis and trauma theory, gender studies and queer studies, studies of the Anthropocene/environmental studies, and animal studies. Occasional invited guests, lectures and class discussions will provide students with a facility for close textual analysis, a knowledge of major currents of thought in the humanities, and an appreciation for the uniqueness and complexity of language and media.

Full details for FREN 3921 - Literary Theory on the Edge

Madness fascinates, mental illness frightens. They are realms of scholarship as well as objects of practical knowledge and representation for the arts and the social actors themselves. This seminar aims to explore the ways in which people who are affected by psychological disorders and strive to face them, are depicted in the 20th and 21st century popular culture. What relationship exists between the medical understanding of these disorders and their portrayals in literature, recovery narratives, cinema, TV series and documentaries? Do contemporary pictures of madness in fiction contribute to demystify and destigmatize mental illness, or do they reinforce negative stereotypes? Are there differences between French fictions and American ones? This seminar will examine each oeuvre as a case study with the resources of critical studies.

Full details for FREN 4070 - Madness Narratives and Pop Culture in 21st Century

Guided independent study of special topics.

Full details for FREN 4200 - Special Topics in French Literature

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Full details for FREN 4300 - Honors Work in French

This seminar will focus on the writings of the polymorphous Martinican poet and thinker, Édouard Glissant (1928-2011).  We will attend to the historical context of French colonialism, particularly in the Caribbean, that gives his writing part of its impetus and to the anticolonial intellectuals with whom he engages (chiefly Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon) as well as to his major self-professed influences (William Faulkner, Saint-John Perse, Hegel) and to an array of interlocutors and fellow-travelers as well as a few dissenters. The seminar will examine the main preoccupations of Glissant's writing (world histories of dispossession and plantation slavery, creolization, Relation, opacity, flux, transversality, Caribbean landscapes as figures of thought, the All-World, etc.) but our focus will be on reading Glissant and attending carefully to the implications of his poetics and of his language for decolonial thought.

Full details for FREN 4368 - Reading Édouard Glissant

While the old concept of the "mind" has been revamped over the last few decades and is routinely accepted as a "scientific object" (through cognitive studies, especially), the equally ancient idea of the soul has now largely been relegated to an article of faith or a metaphor for the psyche.  But our minds need a soul more than we'd like to think.  Our aim in this seminar is to reconstruct a theory of the soul as a mental potentiality that would not necessarily be religious nor conditioned by a belief in the afterlife. To make this slightly paradoxical case, we'll revisit a canonical corpus made of literary and philosophical texts and tie it to recent cognitive science, psychoanalysis or phenomenology.

Full details for FREN 6020 - Theories of the Soul

Madness fascinates, mental illness frightens. They are realms of scholarship as well as objects of practical knowledge and representation for the arts and the social actors themselves. This seminar aims to explore the ways in which people who are affected by psychological disorders and strive to face them, are depicted in the 20th and 21st century popular culture. What relationship exists between the medical understanding of these disorders and their portrayals in literature, recovery narratives, cinema, TV series and documentaries? Do contemporary pictures of madness in fiction contribute to demystify and destigmatize mental illness, or do they reinforce negative stereotypes? Are there differences between French fictions and American ones? This seminar will examine each oeuvre as a case study with the resources of critical studies.

Full details for FREN 6070 - Madness Narratives and Pop Culture in 21st Century

Designed for those with little or no background in French. Aims primarily to develop skill in reading French. Covers grammar basics, extensive vocabulary, and strategies for reading in a foreign language. Some flexibility in selecting texts according to fields of interest.

Full details for FREN 6300 - French Reading for Graduates

This seminar will focus on the writings of the polymorphous Martinican poet and thinker, Édouard Glissant (1928-2011).  We will attend to the historical context of French colonialism, particularly in the Caribbean, that gives his writing part of its impetus and to the anticolonial intellectuals with whom he engages (chiefly Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon) as well as to his major self-professed influences (William Faulkner, Saint-John Perse, Hegel) and to an array of interlocutors and fellow-travelers as well as a few dissenters. The seminar will examine the main preoccupations of Glissant's writing (world histories of dispossession and plantation slavery, creolization, Relation, opacity, flux, transversality, Caribbean landscapes as figures of thought, the All-World, etc.) but our focus will be on reading Glissant and attending carefully to the implications of his poetics and of his language for decolonial thought. 

Full details for FREN 6368 - Reading Édouard Glissant

Guided independent study for graduate students.

Full details for FREN 6400 - Special Topics in French Literature

This introductory course provides a thorough grounding in all the language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing, with practice in small groups.

Full details for ITAL 1110 - Elementary Italian In Rome I

This is a fast-paced, introductory course designed for students with some basic knowledge of the language. This introductory course provides a thorough grounding in all language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing, with practice in small and large groups. Interactive lectures cover grammar and cultural information.

Full details for ITAL 1202 - Italian II

The learning objectives of this course are, first, to introduce students to some of the crucial moments in the history of Italian figurative arts, architecture and fashion design, but also to a range of social issues relevant for understanding the more recent tendencies in art and design in modern Italy; second, to help students refine the way they speak and write about art, architecture and design through a review of the grammatical and lexical structures of Italian and a reinforcement of idiomatic expressions that will increase their ability to discuss, evaluate, analyze and compare issues of relevance to the field of art, architecture and desgn.

Full details for ITAL 1213 - Italian for Art, Architecture and Fashion Design

An intensive elementary Italian language course. This 6-credit course covers material presented in ITAL 1201 and ITAL 1202 in just one semester. It's offered to students who cannot study Italian in the Fall, but can only do it in the Spring semester.

Full details for ITAL 1401 - Intensive Elementary Italian

This course provides a review of composition, reading, pronunciation, and grammar review, as well as guided practice in conversation.  It emphasizes the development of accurate and idiomatic expression in the language.

Full details for ITAL 2130 - Italian Intermediate Composition and Conversation II in Rome

An intermediate-level course that aims to further develop intercultural, reading, listening, speaking, and writing abilities in ITAL 2201. Students will be guided in perfecting their communication skills, improving their cultural proficiency, and developing a critical eye toward printed and visual material drawn from literature, history, politics, science, and arts in the Italophone world. Conversation skills will be practiced in daily discussions and in individual or group projects and presentations. A variety of written assignments will help students increase the range, accuracy, and stylistic appropriateness of their writing. Review of select grammar topics is part of this course, as is reading a short contemporary novel.

Full details for ITAL 2202 - Italian IV

This course, which is at the core of the major and minor in Italian, is designed to give students a basic grounding in some of the most important facets of Italian culture, including cinema, literature, art, and food.  Students will trace the development of Italian national identity in literary and cinematic texts as well as across Italian photography and cuisine.  Readings will include selections from the works of Primo Levi, Roberto Saviano, and Leonardo Sciascia.  Students will also view films by directors such as Rossellini, de Sica, Antonioni, Bertolucci, and Sergio Leone, becoming familiar along the way with genres in Italian national cinema.  By the end of the semester, students will have a working knowledge of the effects of geographic and national fragmentation on political life in post-Risorgimento Italy, understand the so-called Southern Question and the fraught relationship between the Italian South and wealthier Northern regions, and gain different perspectives on political life today in Italy.

Full details for ITAL 2204 - The Cinematic Eye of Italy

From Al Capone to Tony Soprano, the mafia has been the subject of numerous films over the course of 70 years, so many in fact that one might well speak of a "mafia obsession" in American popular culture. Drawing upon a large number of American and Italian films, this course examines the cultural history of the mafia through film. We will explore issues related to the figure of the gangster, the gender and class assumptions that underpin it, and the portrayal-almost always stereotypical-of Italian-American immigrant experience that emerges from our viewings. The aim will be to enhance our understanding of the role of mafia plays in American and Italian culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. Film screenings will include Little Caesar, Scarface, Shame of the Nation, The Godfather Parts I and II, Goodfellas, The Funeral, Donnie Brasco, episodes from The Sopranos, and Gomorrah.

Full details for ITAL 3010 - Screening Cosa Nostra: The Mafia and the Movies from Scarface to The Sopranos

The class will focus on the marvelous Il gattopardo (The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 1956) but with many different side topics and questions including: Sicily-history and geography, the politics of Right and Left in the writing and reception of novels and films, fashion history, sex and ethics, translation, literary prizes and the mourning of lost pets.

Full details for ITAL 3890 - Modern Italian Novel

Guided independent study of special topics.

Full details for ITAL 4200 - Special Topics in Italian Literature

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Full details for ITAL 4300 - Honors in Italian Literature

Long hair, colorful clothes, psychedelic music, free love, and stormy demonstrations: this is the image that the 1970s engraved in our collective imagination. Framed by two waves of strikes - victorious in 1969 and defeated in 1980 - the Italian seventies were a rebellious time. At the end of the economic boom, this decade experienced the outbreak of multiple contradictions that had accumulated in the postwar period, when a poor and rural country had rapidly turned into a modern industrial society.  In these years, Italy appeared dramatically torn between tradition and modernity. This seminar will explore these transformations, focusing on the relationship between culture and help us to depict a diverse landscape beyond the dominant cliche of the "years of lead."  We will scrutinize multiple sources - novels, films, songs and political essays - as well as memorial and historical productions.

Full details for ITAL 6280 - We Want Everything: The Italian 1970s

Guided independent study for graduate students.

Full details for ITAL 6400 - Special Topics in Italian Literature

In this course, students work on their ability to speak, write, read, and understand contemporary Polish. Students will also develop their intercultural competency. The instructor uses communicative language teaching with emphasis on structured input. Students use the textbook and workbook "Hurra! Po polsku 1" supplemented by Polish-English chapter dictionaries. This class covers chapters 10-20. If a student is not sure of his or her language level, he or she can contact the Polish instructor, Ewa Bachminska, at eb583@cornell.edu.

Full details for POLSH 1132 - Elementary Polish II

In this class, students master their language skills: oral communication, listening and reading comprehension as well as creative and formal writing.  Students also deepen their cultural competence.  Classroom discussions include issues of contemporary Poland and various aspects of Polish culture.  Students have writing assignments and one oral presentation in class.

Full details for POLSH 2104 - Advanced Polish II

Second semester introduction to the Lusophone (Portuguese speaking) world.  Emphasis is given to the development of language skills (e.g., speaking, listening, reading, and writing), as well as the appreciation and awareness of Global Portuguese-speaking cultures, prompting students to make comparisons to their own culture.

Full details for PORT 1220 - Elementary Portuguese II

This is a course designed to intermediate students to enhance their oral and written communication skills in Portuguese while engaging a broad range of topics related to Afro-Luso-Brazilian culture. Along with the textbook, students will read a short-essay book, be exposed to a number of films and critically reflect and discuss the films and readings. Students will continue to build their knowledge on grammar and vocabulary as well as Global Portuguese culture and language diversity.

Full details for PORT 2020 - Intermediate Portuguese for Spanish Speakers II

This course provides an introduction and overview of Brazilian culture. It will study different periods of Brazilian history, through the analysis of films, literature, essays, visual arts, and music. Students will explore different definitions of Brazilian identity and "Brazilianness" focusing on key topics including the formation of the colonial Brazil and the emergence of the nation of Brazil as a tropical paradise; slavery and abolition; the particularities century; and the contradictions of the modernization process throughout the 20th century. We will consider elements of Brazilian popular culture such as Carnival, Samba, and "telenovels," and some of the most important cultural movements of the 20th century, such as "Modernismo," "Cinema Novo," and "Tropicalia." The primary objective of the course is to provide students with the relevant background to understand Brazilian cultural history.

Full details for PORT 2800 - Perspectives on Brazil

While building language proficiency and accuracy through communicative activities, the course encourages students to actively interact with one another. The instructor facilitates communication and provides feedback and language learning strategies that guide students to take responsibility of their own learning and become active participants in the process. The course also introduces students to the many peoples and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world, prompting them to make comparisons with their own culture. Additionally, lectures provide students with opportunities to reflect on relevant grammar topics and assist students in developing language learning strategies. Class discussions are conducted entirely in Spanish. After 1220, students may take SPAN 1230, SPAN 2070, or SPAN 2090 depending on their LPS score.

Full details for SPAN 1220 - Elementary Spanish II

The goal of this low-intermediate course is to achieve a higher level of comprehension as well as to advance oral and written expression in a cultural context. Classes are in Spanish and the language is actively used in communicative and creative activities. Students engage in linguistic and literary analysis of texts to acquire new vocabulary, complete analytical exercises, and develop reading strategies. Students continue developing writing skills through composition, and review grammatical structures independently with some clarification by the instructor as needed.

Full details for SPAN 1230 - Continuing Spanish

This innovative course focuses on basic oral communication in Spanish. Emphasis is placed on developing speaking and listening skills and strategies in a culturally relevant context. It is intended for students with limited or no knowledge of Spanish and active class participation is required.

Full details for SPAN 1502 - Conversational Skills for Spanish in Global Contexts

Designed to expand bilingual Heritage students' knowledge of Spanish by providing them with ample opportunities to develop and improve each of the basic language skills, with a particular focus on writing vocabulary. The heritage student has at least one parent of Hispanic origin and grew up speaking Spanish at home; s/he also finished high school here in the US. After this course, students may take SPAN 2095.

Full details for SPAN 2000 - Spanish for Heritage Speakers

Provides a conversational grammar review, with dialogues, debates, compositions, and authentic readings on health-related themes. Special attention is given to relevant cultural differences and how cultural notions may affect medical care and communication between doctor and patient. The objective of 2070 is to provide practice in real-life application, such as taking a medical history, calming a patient, and how to speak to a Hispanic patient in a culturally acceptable manner. After this course, a student may take or SPAN 2095.

Full details for SPAN 2070 - Intermediate Spanish for the Medical and Health Professions

This intermediate course develops accurate and idiomatic oral and written expression in a cultural context. Students achieve a higher level of syntactical and lexical competence through reading and discussing literary texts and viewing films. Particular emphasis is on writing and editing academic essays with peer/instructor feedback. Classes are in Spanish and the language is actively used in oral presentations and communicative, creative, and critical-thinking activities. Students review grammar structures on their own, with clarification and support of the instructor. After this course, students may take SPAN 2095.

Full details for SPAN 2090 - Intermediate Spanish I (Composition and Conversation)

This advanced-intermediate course is designed to prepare students for study abroad and is required for any Cornell CASA program in a Spanish speaking country.  It also serves as an entryway into the major, and advanced-level courses. Students study stylistics, analyze and discuss texts, view films, and acquire advanced reading strategies. Continued emphasis is on writing and editing academic essays with peer and instructor feedback. Classes are in Spanish, and the language is actively used in oral presentations and communicative, creative, and critical-thinking activities. Students review grammar structures on their own, although the instructor may clarify as needed.

Full details for SPAN 2095 - Spanish Intermediate Composition and Conversation II

This advanced course will focus on spoken Spanish in its formal and informal registers, regional dialects, and pronunciations.  Authentic texts from across different genres of film, newspapers, fiction, songs, and essays will be used to develop all skills with emphasis on oral production, as well as intercultural and pragmatic competence.  Students will further their fluency and accuracy by engaging in activities that might include debates, oral presentations, and interviews.

Full details for SPAN 2130 - Advanced Spoken Spanish

Introductory survey of modern Spanish literature. Students develop their analytical skills and learn basic literary concepts such as genre (drama, lyric, short story, and novel) and style (romanticism, realism, etc.) as well as male/female perspectives and the translation of literature to film language. The survey introduces students to Spain's cultural complexity through readings of works by authors representative of its diverse linguistic and literary traditions.

Full details for SPAN 2140 - Modern Spanish Survey

Readings and discussion of representative texts of the 19th and 20th centuries from various regions of Latin America. Among the authors considered are Sarmiento, Hernández, Martí, Darío, Agustini, Cortázar, García Márquez, Poniatowska, and Valenzuela.

Full details for SPAN 2150 - Contemporary Latin American Survey

This course explores major texts and themes of the Hispanic tradition from the 11th to the 17th centuries. We will examine general questions on literary analysis and the relationship between literature and history around certain events, such as medieval multicultural Iberia, the creation of the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th century and the expulsion of the Jews in 1492; the encounter between the Old and the New Worlds; the 'opposition' of high and low in popular culture, and of the secular and the sacred in poetry and prose. Readings may be drawn from medieval short stories and miracle collections; chivalric romances, Columbus, Lazarillo de Tormes, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, among others.

Full details for SPAN 2170 - Early Modern Iberian Survey

This course, which is required for the major, is designed to help the learner develop increased accuracy and sophistication in writing in Spanish for academic purposes and continued oral practice in Spanish. To this end, there will be ample writing and revising practice, with a focus on specific grammatical and lexical areas, customized to the needs of the students enrolled in the course.  All writing will be based on a particular theme relating to Latin America with a focus on film, literary texts, newspaper readings and conducting an interview.

Full details for SPAN 2180 - Advanced Spanish Writing Workshop

Interdisciplinary course offered every spring. Topics vary by semester, but readings always focus on current research in various disciplines and regions of Latin America. The range of issues addressed include the economic, social, cultural, and political trends and transitions in the area. In the weekly meetings, instructors and guest lecturers facilitate student discussions. Students taking the course are required to participate in all class discussions and write a research paper in their chosen focus area.

Full details for SPAN 2200 - Perspectives on Latin America

Interdisciplinary course offered every spring.  Topics vary by semester, but readings always focus on current research in various disciplines and regions of Latin America. The range of issues addressed include the economic, social, cultural, and political trends and transitions in the area.  In the weekly meetings, instructors and guest lecturers facilitate student discussions.  Students taking the course are required to participate in all class discussions and write a research paper in their chosen focus area.

Full details for SPAN 2205 - Perspectives on Latin America in Spanish

This course examines the history of Chile from the 1700s to the present, always with an appreciation for its place in a broader world but always also with attention to its regional and national specificities and its links to the Pacific. Lectures will be paired with readings from various genres: fiction, poetry, journalism, manifestos, speeches, historical monographs, and short stories.

Full details for SPAN 2715 - A Global South: Chile, the Pacific and the World

This 1-credit optional course aims to expand the students' vocabulary, and advance their speaking and reading skills as well as enhance their knowledge and deepen their cultural understanding by supplementing non-language courses throughout the University.

Full details for SPAN 3020 - Spanish Language Across the Curriculum (LAC)

This course focuses on a place and a concept where two of the most urgent issues of our times - migration and environmental degradation - converge, collide, and shape each other. It examines borders not as abstract lines on the map, but as dynamic hubs that connect human societies, politics, and cultures with the natural and built environments that we inhabit and transform. Through scholarly and creative work from an array of borders around the world, we will develop new theoretical approaches and methodological toolkits for rethinking and re-visioning borders in an era of climate change, toxic pollution, and mass extinction. The course encourages multi- and inter-disciplinary projects from students and will feature guests from diverse areas, disciplines, and practices.

Full details for SPAN 3335 - Border Environments

This course examines how Latin American activists, artists, and writers expose and respond to the racialized inequities of environmental harm. We will study how narratives of social justice and environmental well-being intersect, and how present-day environmental crisis emerges from the legacies of colonialism. Authors, artists, and filmmakers may include: Homero Aridjis, Berta Caceres, Carolina Caycedo, Pope Francis, Juan Carlos Galeano, Patricicio Guzman, Chico Mendes, and Bartolina Xixa.

Full details for SPAN 3475 - Environmental Justice in Latin America

Documentaries are born out of the necessity to capture the real and to tell a truth.  When we watch documentaries, we tend to comfortably rely on that claim and, often, take what they teach us as indisputable evidence of what reality is.  In this course, we will put into questions the "reality" that documentaries portray-and the possibility itself of portraying reality-by discussing a selection of Latin American documentaries that raise important issues regarding the ethics and politics of representation. In our discussions, we will critically engage with the boundaries of the cinematic frame and debate the ethical responsibilities of the filmmaker, the value and the political and social impact of the image, the role of the spectator, and the implications of filming and being filmed by an "other".

Full details for SPAN 3710 - Latin American Documentary

As globalization draws the Americas ever closer together, reshaping our sense of a common and uncommon American culture, what claims might be made for a distinctive, diverse poetry and poetics of the America? How might we characterize its dominant forms and alternative practices? What shared influences, affiliations, concerns and approaches might we find and what differences emerge? Ranging across North and South America, Central America and the Caribbean, this course will place in conversation such figures as Poe, Stein, Eliot, Pound, Williams, Neruda, Vallejo, Borges, Parra, Césaire, Walcott, Bolaño, Espada, Waldrop, Vicuña, Hong, and Rankine.

Full details for SPAN 3800 - Poetry and Poetics of the Americas

Guided independent study of special topics. For undergraduates interested in special problems not covered in courses.

Full details for SPAN 4200 - Special Topics in Spanish Literature

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Full details for SPAN 4300 - Honors Work II

Moses Maimonides who was born in Cordoba (1138), moved to Fez as a youth and died in Cairo (1204) is regarded by Jewish, Islamic, and Christian tradition alike as the most important Jewish religious intellectual of the classical age of Islam/the High Middle Ages. This seminar will examine Maimonides as the product of his time and place including his complex relationship with Arabo-Islamic culture and, because of his stature as a communal figure, rabbinic scholar, court physician and philosopher, his role as a catalyst for cultural developments. For comparative purposes we also consider Maimonides' Andalusi contemporary, Ibn Rushd, the philosopher, Muslim jurist, physician and scholar of Islamic law.

Full details for SPAN 4540 - Moses Maimonides

This course examines memoirs and non-fiction works written by a new generation of writers of color. By surveying the anti-racist works of Asian-Spanish, Arab-Spanish, and Afro-Spanish authors we will probe such topics as national identity, migration, belonging, racism and anti-racism, intersectional feminism, and diasporic identities. Students will also learn gender-inclusive and racially inclusive Spanish.

Full details for SPAN 4670 - Narratives of Race and Belonging in Spain

This course offers students an engagement with Transatlantic literature through the notion of encounter. While this notion may sound neutral or friendly, it can nonetheless encode violence of many orders. Students will learn about the beginnings of globalization (1492-1700), the independence period (1791-1898), the avant gardes, the Latin American boom, and the 21st century. This course primarily focuses on Latin American literatures, culture, and history, but we will explore it in connection with the cultures and histories of Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. Students will also think critically about the kinds of encounter produced by: forced migration, resistance to colonial oppression, poems in conversation, literary works that challenge strict definitions of genre; intellectual disputes over the rights of telling the history of a people, etc.

Full details for SPAN 4745 - Knowledge and Power: Literary and Cultural Encounters in the Ibero-Atlantic (1492-2015)

This course focuses on a place and a concept where two of the most urgent issues of our times - migration and environmental degradation - converge, collide, and shape each other. It examines borders not as abstract lines on the map, but as dynamic hubs that connect human societies, politics, and cultures with the natural and built environments that we inhabit and transform. Through scholarly and creative work from an array of borders around the world, we will develop new theoretical approaches and methodological toolkits for rethinking and re-visioning borders in an era of climate change, toxic pollution, and mass extinction. The course encourages multi- and inter-disciplinary projects from students and will feature guests from diverse areas, disciplines, and practices.

Full details for SPAN 6335 - Border Environments

Guided independent study for graduate students. For graduates interested in special problems not covered in courses.

Full details for SPAN 6400 - Special Topics in Spanish Literature

This course offers students an engagement with Transatlantic literature through the notion of encounter. While this notion may sound neutral or friendly, it can nonetheless encode violence of many orders. Students will learn about the beginnings of globalization (1492-1700), the independence period (1791-1898), the avant gardes, the Latin American boom, and the 21st century. This course primarily focuses on Latin American literatures, culture, and history, but we will explore it in connection with the cultures and histories of Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. Students will also think critically about the kinds of encounter produced by: forced migration, resistance to colonial oppression, poems in conversation, literary works that challenge strict definitions of genre; intellectual disputes over the rights of telling the history of a people, etc.

Full details for SPAN 6745 - Knowledge and Power: Literary and Cultural Encounters in the Ibero-Atlantic (1492-2015)

This will be an experimental seminar that will reach out to different sorts of supports and complements to medieval and early modern romance literary texts,such as architecture and stained glass, maps and textiles, to survey how soundscapes were perceived and instrumentalized in verbal form in there periods. The seminar will consider theoretical and critical materials alongside primary texts, and the main topics will include soundscape, ear, voice, listening, echo, secrets, silence, noise, and spaces, while each session will nuance and make connections between these main nodes. Among the primary texts included will be selections from the Bible, Augustine's Confessions, the Chanson de Roland, Razon de amor, Libro de Apolonio, Berceo, Lazarillo, and theoretical/critical texts in addition to Schaefer, Truax, Kelman, etc., may include Kay, Silverman, Cavarero, Burnett, Kelman, Cohen, Kim, Ong, Zumthor.

Full details for SPAN 6960 - Voice to Noise, Medieval and Early Modern Soundscapes