The course offers students the possibility of learning and putting into practice the advanced oral skills necessary to be able to handle oral exposition and discussion in a well-organized and rhetorically correct Spanish. The class will focus on such skills as debating, interviewing, and role-playing, among others. Topics will cover current cultural, political, and socioeconomic issues in the Hispanic world through films.

This course will equip students of Spanish with a variety of skills that prepare them for upper-division courses. Specific areas of study will include introduction to literary genres and movements; practice in critical reading and writing; study of figures of speech, rhetoric, and style; presentation of oral reports; use of library resources. In addition, students acquire basic knowledge of the geography, history, and culture of the Hispanic world.

This course will equip students of Spanish with a variety of skills that prepare them for upper-division courses. Specific areas of study will include introduction to literary genres and movements; practice in critical reading and writing; study of figures of speech, rhetoric, and style; presentation of oral reports; use of library resources. In addition, students acquire basic knowledge of the geography, history, and culture of the Hispanic world.

During the Spanish Empire (16th-18th centuries), witches, prostitutes, transvestite warriors, and daring noblewomen and nuns violated the social order by failing to uphold the expected qualities of the ideal good woman and/or the expected sexual morality of the time. They were criticized, punished, and even burned at the stake. Students will study contradictory discourses of good and evil and beauty and ugliness in relation to women and their place in history.

As women perform gender, so too do they perform culture. In this course we will explore the links between gender and modern Latin American culture through a study of nineteenth through twenty-first century feminist critical theories and self-representations. We will look at the construction of the female subject and her double, or 'other,' through travel writing, political writing, revolutionary testimonies, plays, and letters alongside the plastic arts.

When and how did the notion of 'development' emerge and spread? Why does nearly every country now aspire to it? What stigmas and hierarchies does the term 'underdevelopment' imply? Throughout the Spanish-Speaking world, 'development' has proved problematic not only as a material reality but also as a framework for understanding place, time, and selfhood. For that very reason, Latin American countries and Spain are ideal places from which to question commonly accepted understandings of 'development' (and associated concepts such as 'modernization' and 'progress').