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Graduate Course Offerings

Fall 2022

HISP 610 - Problems in Foreign Language Teaching

Sandra Descourtis

M 1:00pm-4:00pm

This course will offer a foundational background to the history of language teaching approaches, current trends in the field, and practical approaches to lesson planning, course building, assessment, and other major areas of concern for language teachers including the teaching of literature and culture. The course will involve observations and reflections on one's own teaching and will culminate in the development of a teaching portfolio." Textbook: A multiliteracies framework for collegiate foreign language teaching (2015) by K. Paesani, H. Willis Allen, B. Dupuy, J. Liskin-Gasparro, and M. Lacorte ISBN - 0205954049 Pearson. Other readings will be made available on Canvas.

HISP 510 - Spanish as a Historical Problem

Don Tuten and Jose del Valle

T 11:45am-1:45pm

This course proposes a review of various articulations of language and history; a reading against the grain – at times perhaps ironic— of the production of the object “Spanish language” under diverse disciplinary and political conditions. The glotto-political perspective invites us to approach in a reflexive and critical way the conceptualizations of language and the forms of knowledge production that identify objects—objects of legitimate study—such as the historical emergence of Spanish, its organic evolution, the selection of its correct form and the circumstances of its spread throughout the Iberian Peninsula, through the American continent and beyond. The adoption of a critical and reflexive position will force us to examine the material conditions of production of these objects and to keep in mind our own position as university researchers. The goal is to address cultural discourse, disciplinary orders and political projects through the study of the Spanish language as a social practice and its ideological representations.

HISP 720 - The Biographical Turn: Archival Lives, Microhistory & Speculation

Karen Stolley and Yanna Yannakakis

T 2:30pm-5:30pm

This course addresses a broad scope of Latin American history through the lens of the "new biography." With the advent of social history in the 1970's, biography as a mode of engaging with the past, often associated with 'Big Man' history, fell out fashion. It returned through the back door as historians sought to recover the experiences of marginalized people whose lives and histories have remained largely invisible. Source material provides the central challenge for this new mode since women, laborers, and African and Indigenous-descent communities often left little paper trail. Practitioners of the new biography compensate for these archival silences by resorting to different kinds of sources, repurposing older methods like microhistory, and embracing controversial approaches at the boundaries between history and fiction. We will read cutting-edge biographies that made a historiographical impact in their time, and newer work that continues to push the limits of the discipline.

Spring 2022

HISP 520 - Research and Writing Workshop

Karen Stolley

Instruction will focus on approaches to developing and writing research papers, with the final goal of submitting a publishable article to a peer-reviewed journal. Students may develop a paper written for a seminar in the previous semester or may initiate a new project. The course also addresses types of journals, journal audiences, the mechanics and ethics of manuscript submission, and the ethics and politics of choosing to publish in Spanish (Portuguese) or English.

HISP 740 - Introduction to Social Theory

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas

TH 3:00pm-6:00pm

This course provides a broad overview of early sociological and anthropological theory (mid 19th-mid 20th century) for graduate students. The goal of this course is to help students learn to read social theory and identify key arguments in texts, tracing their development and evolution through time. We will aim to discern how key ideas associated with major authors are related to each other and map the networks by which they circulate. While courses such as these inevitably exclude far more than they can include, we will focus on theoretical approaches that have had enduring significance for later generations of social theorists. This course is open to anyone who is interested in exploring how do the social, cultural, political, and economic help us understand and conceptualize the world. The course is taught in English.

GRAD 700 - Public Humanities

Benjamin Reiss and Tom Rogers

M 6:00pm-9:00pm

What can humanities do in the world? Public Humanities engages debates about the relation of humanistic inquiry to communal engagement and stimulates active, collaborative, research of broad public interest. At the center of this course will be projects developed in collaboration with community partners in a wide range of fields inside and outside the university that engage students in socially-meaningful scholarship. Weekly seminar meetings will provide an opportunity to discuss readings about the history and theory of humanities in general and the emerging field of Public Humanities in particular, and will afford time for group work on the collaborative research projects. Brief presentations and short writing assignments will serve to encourage reflection on connections between disciplinary research and Public Humanities practice.

Fall 2021

HISP 510 - Potency of Horror: Sensationalism as Archive

Sergio Delgado Moya

F 10:00am-12:45pm

IN-PERSON

Horror is a potent force: it attracts and disturbs, distresses and exhilarates in one and the same movement. Genres across the spectrum of culture – from Gothic novels to comics to horror films to TV series – have used the potency of horror to great effect, but no genre of communication has unleashed it with the impact and reach of sensationalist journalism. But what exactly is the potency of horror? How is it channeled in crime tabloids and the crime section of newspapers, the most emblematic expressions of sensationalist journalism? How has the potency of horror been re-appropriated (in art and activism, for instance) for the purposes of resisting the social systems where violence is conceived?

HISP 740 - Brazilian Neurosciences: History and Spotlights

Simone Motta

W 4:00pm-6:45pm

IN-PERSON

Neuroscience is a major research area in Brazil where it connects to society broadly and
across class, racial, and regional lines due to its translational character. Since Brazil is
a big country, with many distinct regions that are t geographically, culturally, and
economically different, neuroscience thus reflects those differences. For example,
research in the Amazon region often focuses on etnopharmacology, a field of
pharmacology research that uses the knowledge and tradition of indigenous people on
the usage of plants to treat diseases. Furthermore, research funding in Brazil operates
differently than in US, creating new fields of study. This multi-disciplinary course treats
neuroscience as a case study for understanding the complexity of Brazil Thus we will
combine scientific study with the history of neuroscience in Brazil, an analysis of
regional differences and cultures, and how scientific funding impacts national research
agendas.

This course is aimed at students in both the Sciences and the Humanities and thus
different student backgrounds is an advantage. The scientific background of some
students will be added to the cultural and areas studies knowledge of others so we can
deepen our understanding of how neuroscience is similar, and different, in Brazil and
the United States. To stimulate each week’s discussion, and respect the different
strengths each students brings to the class, we will start each week by discussing 3
different words or concepts that students have read for the first time in that week’s
assignment.

HISP 610/FRE 505 – Problems in Foreign Language Teaching

Alexander Menders

M 1:00pm-4:00pm

IN-PERSON

HISP 720/HIST 562 – Body and Society in Latin America

Yanna Yannakakis/Javier Villa-Flores

TH 2:30pm-5:30pm

IN-PERSON

This course, offered annually, addresses a broad scope of Latin American history, historiography, and historical method through a focused theme. This year’s theme – Body and Society in Latin America – asks how scholars of Latin American history have addressed the challenge posed in the 1990’s by historians Caroline Bynum, Roy Porter, and others to move beyond the mind-body duality embedded in Western epistemology to focus on “the body that eats, that works, that dies, that is afraid” (Bynum, 1995). At the same time, the course emphasizes that the human body “has not timelessly existed as an unproblematic natural object with universal needs and wants” (Porter, 1991). Rather, we highlight how bodily experience, the meaning of the body, and bodily metaphors varied across the vast space and time of Latin American history. How have historians of Latin America used the body as a lens to address projects of colonial domination, national formation, state building, and modernization? How has a focus on the body served to illuminate foundational aspects of identity, such as sex, gender, and sexuality; race and racialization; fitness, disability and normalcy; and class and status? What can a focus on the body tell us about core experiences in Latin America that run the gamut from trauma to ecstasy, such as Christian conversion, conquest, enslavement, reproduction, incarceration, torture, fashion, and sports? In what ways were these experiences lodged in individual bodies and the body politic, and how were those processes connected?

A tentative reading list includes: Molly H. Bassett, The Fate of Earthly Things: Aztec Gods and God-Bodies (U TX Press, 2015); Gabriela Ramos, Death and Conversion in the Andes: Lima and Cuzco, 1532-1670 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010); Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race, and the Colonial Experience in Latin America, 1492-1700(Cambridge University Press, 2012); Tamara Walker, Exquisite Slaves: Race, Status, and Clothing in Colonial Lima (Cambridge University Press, 2017); Nora Jaffary, Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750-1905 (University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Peter Beattie, Punishment in Paradise: Race, Slavery, Human Rights, and a Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Penal Colony (Duke University Press, 2015); Alejandra Bronfman, Measures of Equality: Social Science, Citizenship, and Race in Cuba, 1902-1940(University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Susan Antebi, Embodied Archive: Disability in Post-Revolutionary Mexican Cultural Production(University of Michigan Press, 2021); Brenda Elsey, Futbolera: A History of Women and Sports in Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2019); Diane Nelson, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (University of California Press, 1999).

Spring 2021

HISP 520/HIST 585 – Research and Writing Workshop

Karen Stolley/Jeffrey Lesser

MW 1:00pm-2:15pm

IN-PERSON

The challenges that scholars of Latin American, Caribbean, and Hispanic Studies face are remarkably similar across disciplines and topics as research transitions from an initial idea to an excellent research question to a well-argued final project. Because each participant in this seminar has a different project, we will use a workshop approach to produce, comment on, and be critiqued in a supportive and respectful manner. We will analyze each other's work and push each other for greater clarity and insight as we contribute meaningfully on issues of conceptualization, source critique, methodology, and comparison. Instruction will focus on approaches to developing and writing research papers, with the final goal of submitting a publishable article to a peer-reviewed journal. Students may develop a paper written for a seminar in the previous semester or may initiate a new project. The course also addresses types of journals, journal audiences, the mechanics and ethics of manuscript submission, and the ethics and politics of choosing to publish in Spanish (Portuguese) or English.

HISP 720 – Introduction to Latin American Cinema

Mónica García-Blizzard

TTH 4:20pm-5:35pm

ONLINE

This introductory, graduate-level course on Latin American cinema familiarizes students with the three fundamental areas of expertise that shape scholarship in the field: 1) the techniques of filmic analysis; 2) film theory; and 3) the history of film production in the region from the silent period through contemporary cinema. This overview will both consider Latin America’s filmic production as a triangulated phenomenon with respect to production in the US and Europe, as well as interrogate its national and regional implications. Students will produce 2 written papers, article summaries, and an oral presentation. The course will be conducted in Spanish, but upon consulting with the professor, students may intervene and write their assignments in English.

HISP 720 – Memory, Power and the Archive

Karen Stolley/ Javier Villa-Flores

W 9:40am-12:35pm

ONLINE

This iteration of Themes and Approaches in Latin American History will take as a point of departure Ann Stoler's characterization of archives as epistemological experiments rather than as repositories of sources in order to examine the role played by archival practices in the articulation and negotiation of state-imposed identities and individual and collective strategies of identity formation in Latin America. We will examine the relationship between regimes of classification, memory, and power from the early modern imperialist expansion to the postcolonial condition. Among the themes to be explored are: the relationship between states and archives, governmentality and state intelligence, legal administration and the rule system of law, the access to archives and the democratization of the past, and finally, the role of archives in contemporary utopias and dystopias.

Fall 2020

HISP 610/ FREN 505/ LING 505 - Problems in Foreign Language Teaching

Alex Mendes
Monday 1:00-4:00pm

ONLINE

Content: Introduction to foreign language teaching methodologies and practices. This course will offer a foundational background to the history of language teaching approaches, current trends in the field, and practical approaches to lesson planning, course building, assessment, and other major areas of concerns for language teachers. The course will involve observations and reflection on one's own teaching and will culminate in the development of a teaching portfolio. Textbook: A multiliteracies framework for collegiate foreign language teaching (2015) by K. PAesani, H. Willis Allen, B. Dupuy, J. Liskin-Gasparro, and M. Lacorte ISBN - 0205954049 Pearson. Other readings will be made available on Canvas.

HIST 562R / HISP 720 / ANT 585 / RLR 700 - Themes & Approaches in Latin American History: From Landmarks to Revisions

Jeffrey Lesser and Teresa Davis
MW 9:40am-10:55am

IN-PERSON

Difficult as it is to cover the 500-year sweep of Latin American History and its connection to the rest of the globe in thirteen three-hour seminars, this graduate seminar analyzes the ways such selective coverage might be possible. “Themes and Approaches in Latin American History” embraces the impossibility of the task through explicit and critical engagement with research methods, pedagogy, and narrative. Students will learn conventional geographic and chronological frameworks for understanding and teaching Latin American history. They will develop a shared grasp of what are considered to be the major chronological moments and formative events in the region, while fleshing out interdisciplinary approaches, perspectives, methods, and linkages. At the same time, they will challenge orthodox paradigms by questioning dominant conceptions of periodization, methodology, and discipline. Students will evaluate new scholarship for patterns of revision or the reinforcement of concepts established in presumed canonical works. Articles on historiography, theory, and teaching will supplement national and local case studies. These will elucidate the relationship between methodology and empirical conclusions. Students will also learn how scholars’ shifting intellectual and political agendas have led them to integrate different disciplinary approaches into the study of history.

HISP 510R - Understanding Hispanic Studies: Theories and Methods

Hernán Feldman
MW 2:30pm -4pm

ONLINE

This course will offer a survey of approaches ranging form the field of literary criticism, to those of cultural studies and cultural history. We will study established and recent works of literary criticism and historiography that broach a number of epochal milestones associated with the Long Nineteenth Century in Latin America. Some of the themes will include the Wars of Independence across Spanish America, the recreation of the self under the influence of European Romanticism, Liberalism and Republicanism, and the transition from Empire to Republic in Brazil. We will also discuss the emergence of "Modernismo" and its diffusion throughout Spanish America (José Martí, Rubén Darío), "Antropofagia" in Brazil (Oswald de Andrade) and "Transculturación" in Cuba (Fernando Ortiz).

HISP 740/ PHIL 789 - Philosophical Problems: Marx and Caribbean Marxisms

Rocio Zambrana
Tuesday 1pm -4pm

ONLINE

Content: This course will serve as an introduction to Marx’s thought and its reception in the Caribbean. Readings will provide occasion to discuss the structure and contemporary relevance of basic concepts in Marx’s corpus such as alienation, capital, exploitation, originary accumulation, real and formal subsumption, class struggle, ideology, and emancipation. We will consider the reception history of these concepts in the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora, exploring race/gender as the central technology in the development of and resistance to capitalism.

Texts: We will read the work of CRL James, Stuart Hall, Frantz Fanon, Eric Williams, Clive Thompson, Aimé Césaire, Claudia Jones, Luisa Capetillo, Sylvia Wynter, Édouard Glissant, among others.

Spring 2020

HISP 740/ANTH 585/ WGS 730R / HIST 585 – Brazilian Ideas: Art and Culture

Pedro Duarte

Monday 4:00pm-7:00pm

This course will explore 20th century intellectual thought and how it conceives the cultural relationship between Brazil and the Western world, taking into account art, music, literature, cinema and philosophy.

Brazilian culture has long questioned its national identity. Since the novels of the 19^th century, when Romanticism set the tone, this question has been the core of most Brazilian art. This means that we could look to some art movements as we consider some intellectual figures that thought about Brazil’s formation. It is the case of Modernism, in the 1920s, and Tropicalism, in the late 1960s. They both were not only striving to create modern works of art but also consciously raising the question of a national identity in a context that, although they didn't called it that way, was a transnational one. The metaphor of anthropophagy – elaborated by the writer and critic Oswald de Andrade in a 1928 manifesto – was the link between the two movements, because it made possible to conceive the formation of Brazil neither as a mimic of Western World nor as a complete autonomous land. To practice anthropophagy was the challenge for Brazil to open itself to the world, but only to culturally ingest this world and, through that, gain strength – and even be recognized, at the end, by this world. This was, of course, a strategy for their art: Modernism would “consume” all the European avant-gardes and Tropicalism did the same with rock, disregarding an essentialist nationalism that was concerned about loosing the country’s purity – as if that ever existed. But not only that: this anthropophagy was the corner stone to imagine the formation of Brazil. The songs of Tropicalism, as well as the essays around it, were actually a powerful expression of anthropophagy. It did not attempt to find a symbolical synthesis for national identity – but rather an allegorical syncretism. This makes Tropicalism a movement that conceived Brazil in a transnational perspective.

HISP 740 – Moveable Pasts: History and Memory

Hazel Gold

Tuesday 1:00pm-4:00pm

This seminar will examine the ramifications of Carlos Fuentes’s injunction to “remember the future, imagine the past” by focusing on the relationship between history, fiction, and memory as reflected in Hispanic texts (narratives, films, memorial monuments and museums) of the 19^th-21^st century. While tracing the changing nature of historical inquiry since the 1800s (for example, the shift from positivist to genealogical historical models, contradictory conceptions of what constitutes historical evidence, the replacement of History by histories), the course will examine the ways in which the rewriting of contested past(s) in Spain and Latin America problematizes key aspects of narrative: truth and meaning, representation, authority, temporality. Of special interest are the ways in which these texts work to legitimate or undermine a mythic vision of national history. Close attention will be paid to the role of collective and private memory – an arena of symbolic-cultural display – in the construction of national identities, a phenomenon perhaps best exemplified in contemporary “memory wars.” Theoretical readings will address topics such as the politics of (imposed) memory; nostalgia and mourning; modernist and postmodern critiques of historical knowledge; the poetics of the genre of the historical novel.

HISP 740 – An Introduction to Social Theory

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas

Wednesday 1:00pm-4:00pm

This course provides a broad overview of social theory (mid 19^th-mid 20^th century) for graduate students. The goal of this course is to help students learn to read social theory and identify key arguments in texts, tracing their development and evolution through time. We will aim to discern how key ideas associated with major authors are related to each other and map the networks by which they circulate. While courses such as these inevitably exclude far more than they can include, we will focus on theoretical approaches that have had enduring significance for later generations of anthropologists, sociologist, social theorists from different fields.

GRAD 700 – Public Humanities

Benjamin Reiss and Karen Stolley

Tuesday 4:00pm-7:00pm

What can humanities do in the world? Public humanities engages debates about the relation of humanistic inquiry to communal engagement and stimulates active, collaborative, research of broad public interest.

At the center of this course will be projects developed in collaboration with community partners in a wide range of fields inside and outside the university that engage students with their community partners through socially-meaningful scholarship. (See project descriptions below.) In this course, students will:

address ethical questions surrounding the role of humanistic inquiry in contemporary society;
find connections between their disciplinary training and socially valuable applications;
learn to advocate for humanities research and teaching in the public sphere;
discover how their own disciplinary expectations concerning research correspond to those of other disciplines and social institutions;
build camaraderie and intellectual networks;
enrich Emory’s connections to Atlanta and possibly to other area colleges and universities.

Before the course begins, students will state a preference for work on a particular project; students will ideally be assigned to a research group based on these preferences. The first weeks of the course will feature common readings on the public humanities. Subsequent seminar sessions will include opportunities for students to work on their projects during class time and reflect on how this public-facing work relates to their own disciplinary training.

Fall 2019

HISP 510R – Perspectives in Latin American Cultural Studies

Monica García-Blizzard

Tuesday 1:00pm-4:00pm

This course will offer a survey of diverse perspectives and critical approaches within the field of Latin American Cultural Studies. It will provide a grounding in Latin American critical thought that precedes the advent of cultural studies as a discipline, and explore the continued evolution of the study of culture in Latin America as a result of the emergence of cultural studies as a field of academic inquiry. Organized thematically, the course will explore key works and debates on the following topics: decolonial thought, material culture, gender and the body, film and media, modernity/postmodernity, and memory.

HISP 610/ FREN 505– Problems in Foreign Language Teaching

Alexander Mendes

Monday 1:00pm-4:00pm

Introduction to foreign language teaching methodologies and practices. This course will offer a foundational background to the history of language teaching approaches, current trends in the field, and practical approaches to lesson planning, course building, assessment, and other major areas of concerns for language teachers. The course will involve observations and reflection on one's own teaching and will culminate in the development of a teaching portfolio.

Textbook: A multiliteracies framework for collegiate foreign language teaching (2015) by K. PAesani, H. Willis Allen, B. Dupuy, J. Liskin-Gasparro, and M. Lacorte ISBN - 0205954049 Pearson. Other readings will be made available on Canvas.

HISP 710/ HIST 585-7– Geographies of Capital(isms): Cultural Perspectives

Jeffrey Lesser and Pablo Palomino

Wednesday 9:00am-12:00pm

This multidisciplinary seminar asks about trans(national) human experiences with broad spatial and economic structures. The readings are selected to emphasize the analytical tools developed by scholars of culture, including fiction, oral history, archives, big and little data, ethnography, and quantitative methods. This course focuses on methodology generally, rather than any specific approach to understanding the past. We are primarily interested in argument and we will work with books that treat a range of themes stemming mainly from key economic, socio-political, and cultural aspects of the global web of relationships, spanning Europe, Africa, and Asia, that shaped the Americas. We will explore how scholars’ shifting intellectual and political agendas have led them to integrate different disciplinary approaches into the study of the past in its relationship to the present.

Fiction/non-fiction expected to be on the syllabus includes:

Leo Spitzer, Lives In Between: Assimilation and Marginality in Austria, Brazil, and West Africa, 1780-1945

April Merleaux, Sugar and Civilization: American Empire and the Culture of Politics of Sweetness

Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller

Josh Kun (Editor), The Tide Was Always High: The Music of Latin America in Los Angeles

Karen Tei Yamashita, Circle K Cycles

Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon

Cao Hamburger, The Year My Parents Went on Vacation

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Anarchy’s Brief Summer: The Life and Death of Buenaventura Durruti

HISP 740 – Disfigurations: Art and Death in the Americas

Sergio Delgado Moya

Wednesday 1:00pm-4:00pm

A seminar focused on the intersection of death, pain, violence, and the human figure in art from the Americas from the 1960s to date. We study artists, writers, and filmmakers who source images of pain, death, and violence from crime tabloids and other publications categorized as sensationalist. We also grapple with artists and writers who, during times of brutal political oppression, used sensationalist publications as platforms for publication and distribution of critique and culture.

Spring 2019

HISP 520 - Research and Writing Workshop

Karen Stolley
Tuesday 5pm -8pm

ARTHIST 775R-2/HISP 710-2 - Brazilian Contemporary Visual Art

Staff
Friday 9:00am -12:00pm

In the second half of the XX century, Brazilian visual art gains wider independence and international projection. Historically involved with modernization and the excitement developmentist after World War II, emerged Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape, who besides exposing the ontological crisis of the aesthetics object as unique, aural and mainly visual, they also proposed new materials and the interaction with the spectator. Much of these works were responsible for critical practices in the art system and turned out to be one of the strongest genealogical trends of contemporary art. To make this debate effective, the course has as main objective to present a panorama of Brazilian visual arts as from the 1950s to the present.

HISP 710-3/ENG 789-8 - Landscape in Latinx Studies

Sergio Delgado Moya
Thursday 5:00pm -8:00pm

This seminar grapples with the work of Latina and Latino artists, poets, and writers (Salvador Plascencia, Amy Sara Carroll, Ramiro Gomez, Judy Baca, ASCO, etc.) active in the last few decades, in the years since the 1970s. The focus of the seminar rests on the genre category of landscape, especially as it pertains to poetry and painting. Displacement and migration figure prominently in the conceptual framework of the seminar, as does race and the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

RLR 700-9/HISP 710-4 - Partnering Communities and Universitites: The Transformative Power of Community-Engaged Research, Scholarship, and Teaching

Bobbi (Barbara) Patterson and Vialla Hartfield-Mendez
Monday 1:00pm -4:00pm

Working at the crossroads of democratic citizenship and service, these partnerships historically drew from socio-political conflicts as well as American Protestant ideologies of giving back. Noting 19^th century examples involving academics and/or universities, the course begins analyzing assumptions linking community engagement to the creation of democratic citizens, including service to indigent populations, immigrants, and migrant workers. From this early foundation, the course will examine the recent resurgence of university-community partnerships beginning in the late 1950’s through today. Analyzing contemporary methodologies of community-university engagement including newest models emphasizing genuine partnering, to models focused on socially excluded groups, to global models, the course will provide a comprehensive study of contemporary frameworks. In addition, it will address research strategies and methods proven effective in these partnerships including Grounded Theory, a qualitative analytic and a variety of ethnographic approaches. Pedagogical models and training from engaged to critical pedagogies also will be explored, along with recent values-engaged approaches to assessment of community-engaged scholarship, teaching, and partnership building.

HISP 740 - Topics in Texts and Culture

Hazel Gold
Tuesday 1:00pm -4:00pm

This course will study the processes and functions of memory—individual and collective—as they intersect with the history and politics of the Hispanic world. In approaching this topic we will put the research and analytical methods of the humanities into dialogue with those of cognitive psychology and the qualitative social sciences. Primary texts will be drawn from a broad sampling of media and genres (literature, photography, film, testimonio, memoir, journalism, museums and memorial sites) that illustrate the roles played by memory and acts of symbolic commemoration in hegemonic and counter-hegemonic thought. By examining relevant cases across a wide temporal span—from pre-literate indigenous societies to the postdictatorial democracies of Spain and Latin America—this seminar seeks to understand how and to what ends memory is archived, transmitted, and challenged. How are memories passed across generations and are they still memories when they become stories? What issues arise surrounding methods and varieties of evidence when we study study the material, social, and mental dimensions of memory and its half-life through interdisciplinary frameworks? While case studies will be drawn from Spain and Latin America, all primary texts will be available in Spanish as well as English translation; students from disciplines outside Hispanic Studies will pursue final research projects that are germane to their scholarly and disciplinary interests.

Fall 2018

HISP 510R – Understanding Hispanic Studies: Theories and Methods
Don Tuten and Karen Stolley Tuesday 1:00pm-4:00pm
Content of this course focuses on methods of research in the humanities and qualitative social sciences, ranging from the close reading and critical analysis that is central to the study of literature, to archival and ethnographic research methods more traditionally associated with the fields of history, sociolinguistics, and anthropology. Study of these varied approaches highlights the analytical and ethical choices that confront researchers. Students are also introduced to grant writing and are expected to develop grant proposals for their own projects.

HISP 610 – Seminar on Pedagogy of Language and Culture
Heather Robyn Clarke and Don Tuten MTh 1:00pm-2:30pm
Students normally take this course in their third semester, at the same time as they begin teaching undergraduate Spanish courses. HISP 610 presents the fundamental theories and methods of teaching second/foreign languages, texts/discourse, and culture, with particular attention to the goals and challenges of teaching language and Iberian/Latin American/Latin@ cultures within North American educational institutions. It integrates throughout critical approaches to the teaching of language, culture, and intercultural communication, along with attention to curriculum design for courses at all levels of the undergraduate language and culture program.

HIST 562R-1/HISP 720-1/ANT 585-2/REL 700-7– Topics in Imperial & Post/Colonial Culture
Themes and Approaches in Latin American History: Memory, Power and the Archive in Latin American History Javier Villa-Flores and Karen Stolley Wednesday 1:00pm - 4:00pm Majors Room, Bowden 323
This iteration of Themes and Approaches in Latin American History will take as a point of departure Ann Stoler's characterization of archives as epistemological experiments rather than as repositories of sources in order to examine the role played by archival practices in the articulation and negotiation of state-imposed identities and individual and collective strategies of identity formation in Latin America. We will examine the relationship between regimes of classification, memory, and power from the early modern imperialist expansion to the postcolonial condition. Among the themes to be explored are: the relationship between states and archives, governmentality and state intelligence, legal administration and the rule system of law, the access to archives and the democratization of the past, and finally, the role of archives in contemporary utopias and dystopias.NOTE: Although this course will focus on Latin America, students may choose to work on other regions for their final projects. Required Texts: Charles L. Briggs with Clara Mantini-Briggs, Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge and Communicative Justice (Berkeley: University of California, 2016) Raymond Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Duham: Duke University Press, 2004). Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (Virginia University Press, 2004). Macarena Gómez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells. Culture and State Violence in Chile (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009) Amy Cox Hall, Framing a Lost City: Science, Photography, and the Making of Machu Picchu (University of Texas Press, 2017) David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country –Revisited (Cambridge University Press, 2015) Florencia Mallon, Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community of Nicolas Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906-2001 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). Leigh A. Payne, Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confession in State Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007) Joanne Rappaport, Intercultural Utopias: Public Intellectuals, Cultural Experimentation and Ethnic Pluralism in Colombia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005) Julia Rodriguez, Civilizing Argentina: Science, Medicine, and the Modern State (North Carolina University Press, 2006) Sylvia Sellers-Garcia, Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire Periphery (Stanford University Press, 2013) Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions : Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Durham : Duke University Press, 2004). Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire (Duke University Press, 2003). Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Duke University Press, 2014).

Spring 2018

HISP 520 - Research and Writing Workshop

Karen Stolley, Tuesday 1:00pm-4:00pm

HIST 585 / HISP 710 / ANT 585 / JS 730R (Im)migrants, Ethnicities, and Identities in Latin America

Jeffrey Lesser, Tuesday, 9:00am-12:00pm

Course Description:

Latin America (in its both contemporary and historical geographies) has received large numbers of (im)migrants. Some came by choice, often with religious and/or economic goals. Others were forced migrants, working on the plantations and mines that formed the basis of the exploitative colonial economy. In the nineteenth century, (im)migration came to play a critical economic, social and political role in the newly formed nations of Latin America. At times (im)migrants were viewed as saviors and their entrance was encouraged by elites. In other moments anti-(im)migrant movements and legislation were widespread. As time passed, some of the descendants of those who migrated to and within Latin America re-migrated, at times to other American countries, at times to new continents. This course will put human movement into conversation with the creation of racial, ethnic and national identities in Latin America. We will analyze the history of racial and ethnic discourses and their sociopolitical uses in the formation of modern nations and empires. We will examine postcolonial societies and their constant tension with the legacies of (im)migration. An important goal of the course is to examine questions, themes and methods which in turn can be linked to each student’s own research project.

Assigned Readings:

Aside from the following texts, all course materials will be available through Reserves Direct or on the course Canvas site. Hard copies of the following texts will be on reserve in the library, but should consider purchasing their own copies.

Required Books

1. Van Deusen, Nancy E. Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain. ISBN: 978-0822358589

2. Rein, Raanan. Fútbol, Jews, and the Making of Argentina.

ISBN: 9780804793414

3. Graham, Richard. The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940.

ISBN: 978-0292738577

4. Spitzer, Leo. Lives in Between: The Experience of Marginality in a Century of Assimilation.

ISBN: 978-0809016266

5. Karam, John Tofik. Another Arabesque: Syrian-Lebanese Ethnicity in Neoliberal Brazil

ISBN: 978-1592135400

6. Linger, Daniel Touro. No One Home: Brazilian Selves Remade in Japan.

ISBN: 978-0804741828

7. Yamashita, Karen Tei. Circle K Cycles.

ISBN: 978-1566891080

8. Chang, Jason. Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico, 1880-1940.

ISBN: 978-0252082344

9. Weis, Julie M. Corazón de Dixie Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910.

ISBN: 978-1469624969

10. Pilcher, Jeffrey. ¡Qué vivan los tamales!: Food and the Making of Mexican Identity.

ISBN: 978-0826318732

11. Bryce, Benjamin. To Belong in Buenos Aires: Germans, Argentines, and the Rise of a Pluralist Society.

***This book is set to be released in early 2018. The ISBN currently available is for the hardcover version, which we do not want to order. If the publisher confirms that there will be a paperback version, we would like to order paperback copies. We will follow up with the bookstore as soon as we have a response from from Stanford University Press..***

12. Putnam, Laura. Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age.

ISBN: 978-0807872857

13. Brooks, Max. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.

ISBN: 978-0307346612

14. Dunn, Christopher. Contracultura: Alternative Arts and Social Transformation in Authoritarian Brazil.

ISBN: 978-1469628516

HISP 730/ANT 585 - Topics in Intercultural Discourse and Translation: Intercultural Communication

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas, Wednesday 4:00pm-7:00pm

This course is an intensive introduction to the study of communication as a cultural system and speech as socially embedded communicative practice. It is designed for those wishing to gain enough background in theories of contact and communication to critically understand the place of language in social interaction. It is designed for graduate students; upper level undergraduates are welcome to enroll, with permission of the instructor. There are no special prerequisites.

The course will be divided in two units. The first one will explore relevant theoretical essays that will help with the understanding of how semiotic systems get constituted. The second half will focus on ethnographies of communication of cross-cultural encounters addressing Spanish-speaking communities around the globe; as well as how Spanish is constructed and circulated in the US through the analysis of different media outlets; how Latinx communities negotiate talk and; language policies that affect immigrants from beyond Spanish-speaking communities.

Topics include (among many): How does culture influence the communication process? What is the relation between culture, communication, and identity? How do various societal factors (economics, mass media, religion) influence intercultural communication?

Fall 2017

HISP 510R Understanding Hispanic Studies: Theories and Methods

(Instructors: Hazel Gold + Don Tuten) Tuesdays 1:00pm-4:00pm

Content of this course will foreground theoretical approaches as well as the history and polemics surrounding the field of Hispanism. It will introduce students to the contested boundaries of this evolving field, with particular attention to the program’s three research foci. It will also introduce students to the practice and ethics of public scholarship.

HISP 710 Topics in Identity and Citizenship: Brazil Civil-Military Memories

(Instructor: Schmidt) Thursdays 4:30pm-7:30pm

This course analyzes the processes, social actors and cultural supports involved in the construction, consolidation, and denial of the memories regarding Brazil’s traumatic dictatorship that began in 1964. It will introduce conceptual and methodological tools for the analysis of memory and will offer insights on different narratives concerning the dictatorship period: memory books, news articles, films, fictional writings, monuments and museums, reports, legal documents and texts from different areas in the field of humanities, History in particular.

The main course topics will be: 1 – In what context and through which social actors (collective or individual) are memories expressed? 2 – What political interests are memories related to? 3 – What are the ethical, moral and aesthetical implications? 4 – How are memories articulated and how do they struggle for their place in the public arena? 5 – In what manner do experts appropriate memories of the Brazilian dictatorship?

HIST 562R/HISP 720 Topics in Imperial and Post/Colonial Culture: New Paradigms & Old Trends

(Instructors: Yanna Yannakakis + Karen Stolley) Wednesday 1:00pm-4:00pm

This course takes on the 500-year sweep of Latin American History with an eye to regional themes and national/local case studies. Students engage with different geographic and chronological frameworks for understanding and teaching Latin American history, and with canonical and cutting-edge texts that have shaped the field. At the same time, students are asked to challenge dominant paradigms by asking “is Latin America a region?”; “when does the colonial era end?”; “where are the boundaries among History, Literature, and Anthropology”? While we require this course (which is repeatable) of all Ph.D. candidates in Latin American History in their first and third semesters, we encourage students across a range of disciplines and geographic specializations to register. Analytical concerns generally revolve around the relationship among theory, method, and historical sources, and how scholars’ shifting intellectual and political agendas have led them to integrate different disciplinary approaches into the study of history.