(Offered as SPAN 451 and LLAS 451) This course highlights literary connections between the United States and the Spanish-speaking world via translation. Through a study of texts from the late nineteenth century to the present, we will look at the role of translation in literary histories and current literary activities. We will examine how writers have translated in order to practice and enhance their creative writing. We will use translation as a way to access and analyze literary texts. We will also think about translation as professional and collaborative activities.

(Offered as SPAN 357 and LLAS 357) Spanish is the second-most widely spoken language in the world. With more than 400 million native speakers, it has official status in 21 countries. In the United States more than 40 million people use Spanish in their daily lives. What exactly is the Spanish language? What do you actually know when you speak Spanish? These questions are at the heart of this course.

(Offered as SPAN 301 and LLAS 301) This course provides an introduction to the diverse literatures and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world over the course of six centuries, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Students will learn the tools, language, and critical vocabulary for advanced work reading the canon of Hispanic literatures from Spain, Latin America and the Caribbean Basin, identifying aesthetic trends, historical periods and diverse genres such as poetry, narrative, theater and film.

(Offered as HIST 264 [LA/TC/TE/TR/^P] and LLAS 264)  Over the course of three centuries, massive migrations from Europe and Africa and the dramatic decline of indigenous populations in South and Central America radically transformed the cultural, political, economic, and material landscape of what we today know as Latin America. This course will investigate the dynamism of Latin American societies beginning in the ancient or pre-conquest period and ending with the collapse of European rule in most Spanish, Portuguese, and French speaking territories in the New World.

(Offered as AMST 140 and LJST 140) While discussions of white supremacy are more common now than even a few years ago, the image of the United States as a nation of immigrants remains popular. How can we connect these two notions, that on the one hand the country was founded on and practices a settler colonialism and racial capitalism that privileges whites, with that on the other hand many immigrants of color are working towards their American Dream?

Independent reading course. Reading in an area selected by the student and approved in advance.

Fall and spring semesters. The Department.

(Research Seminar) What we call property is enormously important in establishing the nature of a legal regime. Moreover, an exploration of property offers a window on how a culture sees itself. Examining how property notions are used and modified in practice can also provide critical insights into many aspects of social history and contemporary social reality.

[Analytic Seminar] The proliferation of law in film, on television, and online has expanded the sphere of legal life itself. Law lives in images which today saturate our culture and which have a power all their own, and the moving image provides a domain in which legal power operates independently of law’s formal institutions. This course takes up law and film to explore law’s image and the imagined life of law. It will consider the ways “myths” about law are reproduced and contested in film and other visual media, and the way film proposes a visual aesthetics of law.