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

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

Psychoanalysis considers the human being not as an object of treatment, but as a subject who is called upon to elaborate an unconscious knowledge about what is disrupting her life, through analysis of dreams, symptoms, bungled actions, slips of the tongue, and repetitive behaviors. Freud finds that these apparently irrational acts and behavior are ordered by the logic of the fantasy, which provides a mental representation of a traumatic childhood experience and the effects it unleashes in the mind and body-effects he called drives. As unbound energies, the drives give rise to symptoms, repetitive acts, and fantasmatic stagings that menace our health and sometimes threaten social coexistence, but that also rise to the desires, creative acts, and social projects we identify as the essence of human life. Readings will include fundamental texts on the unconscious, repression, fantasy, and the death drive, as well as case studies and speculative essays on mythology, art, religion, and group psychology. Students will be asked to keep a dream journal and to work on their unconscious formations, and will have the chance to produce creative projects as well as analytic essays.

Full details for ROMS 3560 - Freud and Psychoanalysis

Cultures are never monolithic, and they are very rarely impervious to foreign influences. Exchanges allow for the inception of individual cultures: the widespread process of dual integration and alteration of external behaviors, ideas, objects, texts, or practices is constitutive of the plasticity of group evolution. This research seminar will offer a critical inquiry on the rise of the concept of “culture” and of its prefixations (multi, inter, cross, trans), contrasting it with categories such as “global(ized),” “planetary,” “universal,” “cosmopolitics.” We’ll articulate literary theory with anthropology, experimental psychology with political theory, or ethics with biology (“animal culture” now forming a legitimate category). We’ll additionally study some cases of transcultural circulations in the human context (science, literature and the arts), especially between Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean.

Full details for ROMS 4836 - Transcultural Theory

This course is a theoretical exploration of digital biopolitics, a convergence of how digital technologies mediate, govern, and regulate life, particularly within frameworks of power and control. Extending the concept of biopolitics—the governance of populations through the imbrication of life processes into political calculations to enhance the former—the course foregrounds how computational systems, algorithms, and data practices shape and are shaped by cultural, political, and economic forces. The interdisciplinary course, linking political philosophy, media theory, and race studies, thinks with a wide range of scholars for whom digitality, as it encounters biopolitics, is generative for a deeper understanding of the datafied world. This exploration follows sections, including data as a resource, digital embodiment and corporeality, digital labor and necropolitics, and biopolitical resistance in digital spaces. Foundational to the course are inquiries about posthumanism and ethics, such as: How does the digital reconfigure traditional boundaries between human and non-human, self and other? As technology mediates biopolitical power, who holds systems accountable for harm and injustice?

Full details for ROMS 4944 - Digital Biopolitics

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

Full details for ROMS 6739 - Agamben's Homo Sacer

Cultures are never monolithic, and they are very rarely impervious to foreign influences. Exchanges allow for the inception of individual cultures: the widespread process of dual integration and alteration of external behaviors, ideas, objects, texts, or practices is constitutive of the plasticity of group evolution. This research seminar will offer a critical inquiry on the rise of the concept of “culture” and of its prefixations (multi, inter, cross, trans), contrasting it with categories such as “global(ized),” “planetary,” “universal,” “cosmopolitics.” We’ll articulate literary theory with anthropology, experimental psychology with political theory, or ethics with biology (“animal culture” now forming a legitimate category). We’ll additionally study some cases of transcultural circulations in the human context (science, literature and the arts), especially between Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean.

Full details for ROMS 6836 - Transcultural Theory

This course is a theoretical exploration of digital biopolitics, a convergence of how digital technologies mediate, govern, and regulate life, particularly within frameworks of power and control. Extending the concept of biopolitics—the governance of populations through the imbrication of life processes into political calculations to enhance the former—the course foregrounds how computational systems, algorithms, and data practices shape and are shaped by cultural, political, and economic forces. The interdisciplinary course, linking political philosophy, media theory, and race studies, thinks with a wide range of scholars for whom digitality, as it encounters biopolitics, is generative for a deeper understanding of the datafied world. This exploration follows sections, including data as a resource, digital embodiment and corporeality, digital labor and necropolitics, and biopolitical resistance in digital spaces. Foundational to the course are inquiries about posthumanism and ethics, such as: How does the digital reconfigure traditional boundaries between human and non-human, self and other? As technology mediates biopolitical power, who holds systems accountable for harm and injustice?

Full details for ROMS 6944 - Digital Biopolitics

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 intermediate conversation and composition French course is designed for students interested in business fields such as Hospitality, Business Management, and Marketing, those looking for an internship or a job in French-speaking businesses or students interested in exploring the language and cultures of the French-speaking business world. The course will focus on improving oral and written skills through the acquisition of specific vocabulary and the review of essential grammatical structures commonly used in business. Students will use authentic written, visual and listening materials and engage in interactive activities relevant to the professional world and its intercultural dimension.

Full details for FREN 2080 - French for Business

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

The palace of Versailles has been an object of fascination for over three hundred years. A place of splendor and squalor Versailles has been identified with French culture as the epitome of elegance and grace from Louis XIV to Karl Lagerfeld. It has also been the scene of scandal and tragedy. This course will examine the importance the reality and mythology of Versailles has played across the centuries and across the world. We will examine the construction, the art, architecture, garden construction music and social history of the palace and its place both in Absolutist France and in our contemporary world. Using movies, reproductions or art and architecture as well as revealing the secrets of its sexual politics and murderous plots we will attempt to understand why the fascination of the greatest of all palaces continues to draw millions of visitors each year trying to discover its grandeur and decadence.

Full details for FREN 2270 - Versions of Versailles

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 texts, and will be conducted in French.

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

The French Revolution was one of the most dramatic upheavals in history, sweeping away centuries of tradition and ushering in the political and cultural modernity we arguably still live in today. Although often remembered for mass executions by guillotine and the rise of Napoleon, it was much more. Between 1789 and 1815, the French people experimented with virtually every form of government known to the modern world: absolutist monarchy, constitutional monarchy, representative democracy, radical left-wing republicanism, oligarchy, and right-wing autocracy. This course explores the rapidly changing political and social landscape of this extraordinary period, the evolution of political culture (the arts, theater, songs, fashion, the cult of the guillotine), and shifting attitudes towards gender, race, and slavery.

Full details for FREN 2860 - The French Revolution

This course offers an introduction to Canadian literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with a special focus on the multilingual, multicultural character of Canadian cultural production. We'll take a look at texts from both French-speaking (in translation) and English-speaking Canada, including Indigenous and immigrant authors who locate themselves at once inside and outside those linguistic traditions. Special emphasis will be given to queer voices and other engagements with the representation of gender, sexuality, and desire. An additional independent study, conducted in French, may be taken by students who wish to explore Francophone material in greater depth.

Full details for FREN 2900 - Contemporary Canadian Literature

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

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 Conde, 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

Beginning in the early days of silent cinema, a rich tradition of what are called city films, combines technological innovation with the exploration of specific urban spaces. Students in this class will learn how to think about the possibilities of limits of cinema as a way of knowing a city and its cultures, including linguistic cultures. This course will be offered in English and is open to all students. The focus will be on the relationship between the cinema and the development of urban centers, including Madrid, Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Venice.

Full details for FREN 3485 - Cinematic Cities

This course will offer an overview of theoretical and historical responses to bodily and cognitive difference. What was the status of people with (dis)abilities in the past, when they were called monsters, freaks, abnormal? How are all of these concepts related, and how have they changed over time? How have we moved from isolation and institutionalization towards universal design and accessibility as the dominant concepts relative to (dis)ability? Why is this shift from focusing on individual differences as a negative attribute to reshaping our architectural and more broadly social constructions important to everyone? Authors to be studied include: Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, Lennard Davis, Tobin Siebers, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, and Jasbir Puar.

Full details for FREN 3520 - (Dis)ability Studies: A Brief History

Psychoanalysis considers the human being not as an object of treatment, but as a subject who is called upon to elaborate an unconscious knowledge about what is disrupting her life, through analysis of dreams, symptoms, bungled actions, slips of the tongue, and repetitive behaviors. Freud finds that these apparently irrational acts and behavior are ordered by the logic of the fantasy, which provides a mental representation of a traumatic childhood experience and the effects it unleashes in the mind and body-effects he called drives. As unbound energies, the drives give rise to symptoms, repetitive acts, and fantasmatic stagings that menace our health and sometimes threaten social coexistence, but that also rise to the desires, creative acts, and social projects we identify as the essence of human life. Readings will include fundamental texts on the unconscious, repression, fantasy, and the death drive, as well as case studies and speculative essays on mythology, art, religion, and group psychology. Students will be asked to keep a dream journal and to work on their unconscious formations, and will have the chance to produce creative projects as well as analytic essays.

Full details for FREN 3560 - Freud and Psychoanalysis

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

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

Taking the form of ghosts, revenants, and zombies, dead are regularly summoned up in literature, film, and TV series. Their eternal return and narrative power reflect the upheavals of our troubled times as either disquieting or mischievous, tragic, or comic characters. How can we explain this return of the repressed? How do they manifest themselves in contemporary French-language fiction? What do they tell us about ourselves, our hidden memories, our conceptions of the invisible, an our projections into the future? This seminar will scrutinize many novels, films and TV series that raise these questions by combining literary, psychological, and anthropological approaches. This will provide the opportunity of rethinking some key methodological notions such as uncanny, hauntology, and spectral turn.

Full details for FREN 4630 - Ghost Stories: Literature, Cinema, and TV Series

Cultures are never monolithic, and they are very rarely impervious to foreign influences. Exchanges allow for the inception of individual cultures: the widespread process of dual integration and alteration of external behaviors, ideas, objects, texts, or practices is constitutive of the plasticity of group evolution. This research seminar will offer a critical inquiry on the rise of the concept of “culture” and of its prefixations (multi, inter, cross, trans), contrasting it with categories such as “global(ized),” “planetary,” “universal,” “cosmopolitics.” We’ll articulate literary theory with anthropology, experimental psychology with political theory, or ethics with biology (“animal culture” now forming a legitimate category). We’ll additionally study some cases of transcultural circulations in the human context (science, literature and the arts), especially between Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean.

Full details for FREN 4836 - Transcultural Theory

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

Guided independent study for graduate students.

Full details for FREN 6400 - Special Topics in French Literature

Cultures are never monolithic, and they are very rarely impervious to foreign influences. Exchanges allow for the inception of individual cultures: the widespread process of dual integration and alteration of external behaviors, ideas, objects, texts, or practices is constitutive of the plasticity of group evolution. This research seminar will offer a critical inquiry on the rise of the concept of “culture” and of its prefixations (multi, inter, cross, trans), contrasting it with categories such as “global(ized),” “planetary,” “universal,” “cosmopolitics.” We’ll articulate literary theory with anthropology, experimental psychology with political theory, or ethics with biology (“animal culture” now forming a legitimate category). We’ll additionally study some cases of transcultural circulations in the human context (science, literature and the arts), especially between Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean.

Full details for FREN 6836 - Transcultural Theory

This seminar focused on early modern texts by (e.g.) Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Diderot, Rousseau. and others. Dealing with early modern anti-and post-humanism, and topics such as: subjectivity, embodiment, alterity, vegetal being, monstrosity, representation, affect, violence, politics, ecology, and nature. With forays into ancient and more modern philosophy, the 20th- and 21st-c. afterlife of early modern issues (Freud; Heidegger; Derrida; Agamben; etc.),and related or homologous problems and modes in the visual arts (e.g., the grotesque; the beautiful and the sublime; sketching; the non-finito; fragments; ruins; e.g.,).

Full details for FREN 6945 - Aesthetics, Before and Beyond Kant

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 aim of this course is to help students familiarize themselves with one of the most important, and world-renowned aspects of Italian culture, or rather La Cucina Italiana. This course will combine different language learning approaches like grammar and audio/oral activities such as video clips, role play activities in class, interviews regarding food topics, etc., as well as some hand-on lessons. Class will alternate grammar and conversation lessons, while adding a few practical cooking activities that will focus on recipes and traditions that characterize different geographical regions of Italy.

Full details for ITAL 1212 - Italian Food Culture

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

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

In this film and culture course dedicated to Italian cinema, we will be looking at and reflecting on some of the most important films that made history both in Italy and the world from the end of the World War II to today.

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

Beginning in the early days of silent cinema, a rich tradition of what are called city films, combines technological innovation with the exploration of specific urban spaces. Students in this class will learn how to think about the possibilities of limits of cinema as a way of knowing a city and its cultures, including linguistic cultures. This course will be offered in English and is open to all students. The focus will be on the relationship between the cinema and the development of urban centers, including Madrid, Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Venice.

Full details for ITAL 3485 - Cinematic Cities

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 continue to work on their four language skills: listing, speaking, reading, and writing as well as cultural competence. We focus on practical communication. The instructor uses communicative language teaching (CLT) with an emphasis on structured input.

Full details for POLSH 1132 - Elementary Polish II

In this course, students continue working on their ability to speak, write, read, and understand contemporary Polish. Students will also enhance their intercultural competency. The instructor uses communicative language teaching with emphasis on structured input. Students use the textbook and workbook Hurra! Po polsku 2 supplemented by Polish-English chapter dictionaries. This class covers chapters 1-10. 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 2033 - Intermediate Polish I

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 intermediate level students with the opportunity to advance their oral and written fluency, proficiency, and understanding of the grammar of Portuguese. In addition, students will be introduced to several cultural aspects of the Lusophone world, including regionalisms of Portuguese language. This goal will be achieved with the aid of literary and journalistic texts. Students will be expected to give individual and group presentations, as well as to write short pieces in the target language. The course is tailored to bridge language learning and content-based courses and research in Portuguese.

Full details for PORT 3100 - Advanced Portuguese I

What does it mean for a nation to "devour" the world and reinvent itself in the process? This course takes Oswald de Andrade's daring 1928 Cannibal Manifesto as its point of departure to explore how Brazil has continually reimagined itself through acts of cultural transformation and resistance. From the radical experiments of modernism and the neo-concrete movement, to the psychedelic aesthetics of Tropicalia and and the contemporary visions of Afrofuturism, this course traces how art, music, performance, film, and literature have reshaped Brazilian identity. Conducted in Spanish.

Full details for PORT 4320 - Anthropophagic 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

SPAN 1230 is the third course in the Spanish language sequence. It is designed to help students progress from the novice high level to the intermediate mid level in speaking, listening, reading and writing. The course is structured around four thematic units: fashion and art; the natural world; personal relationships; and health. In each unit, we will learn the vocabulary and grammar constructions that are necessary to talk about the unit's topic. Particular emphasis will be placed on the skill of giving and defending opinions. Throughout the semester, we will discuss and analyze a wide variety of art from the Hispanic world, including songs, fashion, visual arts, TV shows, films, performance art, newspaper articles, documentaries, film shorts and podcasts. The overall goal of this course is to develop students' ability to comprehend authentic materials in Spanish and formulate nuanced opinions about those materials.

Full details for SPAN 1230 - Continuing Spanish

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, Hernandez, Marti, Dario, Agustini, Cortazar, Garcia Marquez, 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, Calder?and Sor Juana Ines 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

How does the body remember the past? In this course, we will take this question as a point of departure to analyze the work of twelve contemporary artists from Latin America whose performances revisit individual, collective, national and global pasts in order to challenge official histories, denounce unspoken violences, and create space of empowerment and healing. As we discuss these performances in dialogue with the work of various critics and theorists, we will consider the potentialities and the limitations of performance, the ethics of reenactment and representation, and the sort of memories and archives we can only access through the body.

Full details for SPAN 3290 - Performance and Memory in Contemporary Latin America

This course is an introductory survey of Latin American gender debates, feminist movements, and theories from the turn of the 20th century to today. Taking a regional perspective, we will examine the various defining strains of Latin American feminist tradition(s), including: 1) mass movements, activism, and mothers; 2) crossovers with anticolonial, indigenous, diversity, and transgender theories.

Full details for SPAN 3345 - Latin American Feminisms

Beginning in the early days of silent cinema, a rich tradition of what are called city films, combines technological innovation with the exploration of specific urban spaces. Students in this class will learn how to think about the possibilities of limits of cinema as a way of knowing a city and its cultures, including linguistic cultures. This course will be offered in English and is open to all students. The focus will be on the relationship between the cinema and the development of urban centers, including Madrid, Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Venice.

Full details for SPAN 3485 - Cinematic Cities

Is war simply destruction or is it also culture? Why do films, novels, and video games so often celebrate combat, turning it into spectacle, discipline, and even art? Can violence be "just"? What role does war play in modern society, and why? This course examines how war and martial arts shaped the Hispanic world early modernity. Through literary texts, visual culture, and performance, we explore how swordplay, dueling, and military training became aesthetic and ideological expressions of class, gender, religious, and racial identities. From Spanish Golden Age plays and poems to fencing manuals and colonial chronicles, students will trace how martial practices transformed identities across the early modern Atlantic. Conducted in Spanish.

Full details for SPAN 3785 - War and Martial Arts in the Hispanic World

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 Americas? How might we characterize its dominant forms and alternative practices? What shared influences, affiliations, concerns and approaches might we find and what convergences and differences emerge? Ranging across North and South America, Central America and the Caribbean, this course will place in conversation such figures as Poe, Pound, Stein, Williams, Neruda, Vallejo, Borges, Parra, Bola?Cesaire, Nourbese Philip, Hong, Long Soldier, Rankine, Lamar, Kaminsky, and Xie.

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

This course explores how the vocabulary (words like price and credit), structure (such as one of loss and gain), and ropes of medieval (and early modern) Spanish fiction speak to the emergence of different economic figures, reading texts from the 13th through the 17th centuries may include Poema de mio Cid, ibro de Apolonio, Yida de santa Maria Ogipciaca, Libro del conde Lucanon, poetry by Quevedo and Gongora, etc. and critical texts by Mauss, Derrida, Shell, Bataille, and others.

Full details for SPAN 4060 - Medieval Literary Economics

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

What does it mean for a nation to "devour" the world and reinvent itself in the process? This course takes Oswald de Andrade's daring 1928 Cannibal Manifesto as its point of departure to explore how Brazil has continually reimagined itself through acts of cultural transformation and resistance. From the radical experiments of modernism and the neo-concrete movement, to the psychedelic aesthetics of Tropicalia and and the contemporary visions of Afrofuturism, this course traces how art, music, performance, film, and literature have reshaped Brazilian identity. Conducted in Spanish.

Full details for SPAN 4320 - Anthropophagic Brazil

The course will explore medieval culture through the five senses, emphasizing how the differences with our own knowledge and practice of the sensorium produce sets of questions and avenues for thought, attuning ourselves both to our sensorial environment and to the premodern imagination. Moving between theoretical texts-philosophy, cognition, theology, perception-and case studies-literature, but also architecture, music, stained glass, manuscripts, etc. - we will examine the conceptualization and interpretation of the sensorium and experiment with ways of reconstructing or refreshioning the medieval in the modern.

Full details for SPAN 4380 - The Medieval Senses

In this course. we will read Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605-1615),unquestionably one of the most influential works in world literature. Our approach will be twofold. From the vantage point of "then," we will examine the work's inescapable historicity by exploring the intricate web of social phenomena, political process, cultural movements, and literary genres that shaped the text. From the perspective of "now," we will consider the diverse ways in which Don Quixote is read, studied, and understood today, engaging with a range of methodological approaches and tracing its countless translations, rewritings, remediations, appropriations, and reimaginings. To that end, we will critically analyze contemporary cultural products such as films, documentaries, television series, and graphic novels. This course will be conducted primarily in Spanish, except on the days specified in the syllabus.

Full details for SPAN 4385 - Don Quixote:Then and Now

This seminar will explore Spain's political and cultural landscape through the language of modern and contemporary visual constructions, with a specific focus on three distinct yet interrelated visual spheres: spectacles, monuments, and ruins.

Full details for SPAN 4465 - Spectacles, Monuments, Ruins

As Latinx studies continues to expand beyond its nationalistic origins and re-examines its geographical bounds, nuancing the role of borders within the field becomes urgent. This course probes at the primacy of the border in Latinx studies by centering Caribbean waters. As a liquid that refuses to succumb to the violence of fragmentation and instead embodies iterations of radical wholeness, water has an innate capacity to undo borders, a quality epitomized by the Spanish verb desbordar (to overflow). Through discussion and analysis of key Latinx cultural products we will gain an appreciation for the multiple ways in which water sustains provocative contradictions across borders regarding representations of historical memory, gender and sexuality, migration, race, and religion and spirituality, among others.

Full details for SPAN 4577 - Desbordando: Reading Caribbean Waters in Latinx Studies

This course explores how the vocabulary (words like price and credit), structure (such as one of loss and gain), and tropes of medieval (and early modern) Spanish fiction speak to the emergence of different economic figures, reading texts from the 13th through the 17th centuries, and critical texts by Mauss, Derrida, Shell, Bataille, and others.

Full details for SPAN 6060 - Medieval Literary Economics

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 provides graduate students with an overview of feminist and queer theories of gender and the body, as well as representations of the gender and the body in narrative fiction. We will critical examine the discursive turn; in feminist theory as well as more recent challenges to this school of thought including new feminist materialism and critical disability studies. We will also look at the ways in which gender is inflection by sexuality, race, caste, and class.

Full details for SPAN 6840 - Excess: Gender and Embodiment in Theory and Fiction