Graduate Courses

HISP 510

Hazel Gold
W 1pm – 4pm
Defining what is signified by the term 'Hispanism' presents an epistemological and ideological challenge to scholars. This seminar will introduce students to Hispanism's key disciplinary debates and controversies. Students will be equipped to develop and articulate their own positioning in these debates while cultivating their critical-analytical skills through a range of written and oral exercises.

This course will cover Iberian/peninsular and Latin American cultural studies. The course will also be used as an opportunity for members of the Hispanic Studies PhD program faculty to attend and present their work.

HISP 610 / FREN 505 / LING 505

Sandra Descourtis
M 1pm – 4pm
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 710

Monica Okamoto
W 4pm – 6:45pm
Students engage in in-depth study of a particular issue or set of issues relating to a general theme. This course directly addresses the program's research focus on "narratives/performances of identities and citizenship." Under this rubric, we will design and teach seminars that explore stories, histories and performances of belonging and exclusion in the Hispanic world, with reference to contemporary questions of local, national, and global citizenship.

HISP 720 / HIST 585 / CPLT 752 / ANT 585

Malinda Lowery, Yanna Yannakakis
T 2:30pm – 5:30pm
How do we define Indigenous history? How has it been colonized, and why decolonize it? This course addresses communities in the Americas in a thematic way, emphasizing theories and methodologies from ethnohistory, collaborative and engaged scholarship, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. Rather than looking at Indigenous history in isolation, we begin with the assumption that Native people have encountered, negotiated and changed their societies in collaboration with other Native groups and peoples from other continents. Translation, diverse knowledges, and alternate forms of recording history will therefore be central themes, as we consider how Native peoples forged new economies, societies, forms of spirituality, and legal norms through diverse encounters.

We will explore current debates about the definitions and uses of terms such as decoloniality, indigeneity, empire, migration, and sovereignty. As we consider these concepts, we will bring a critical eye to them, taking stock of whose voices are louder than others and who offers paradigms that we can share as scholars working in different disciplines, time periods, and places.

The scope of the course is broad, and as such, does not pretend to cover the whole hemisphere. We will seek out hemispheric comparisons, putting Indigenous histories of South America, Mesoamerica, and North America into conversation.

HISP 740

Hazel Gold
T 10:30am – 1:30pm
This seminar will explore the ramifications of Carlos Fuentes's injunction to "remember the future, imagine the past" by mapping the relationship between history and memory as configured in Hispanic texts of the 19th-21st century. In the context of cultural memory studies, and taking into account the evolving nature of historical inquiry (e.g., the shift from positivist to genealogical historical models, differing conceptions of what constitutes historical evidence, the replacement of History by microhistories), the course will examine the rewriting of contested pasts in Spain and Latin America through a variety of media: fiction and nonfiction narratives, films, memorial monuments and museums, digital platforms. In what ways do these texts, as alternative modes of knowing, legitimate or undermine a mythic vision of national history? What is the role of private and collective memory --an arena of symbolic-cultural display-- in contemporary "memory wars"? Theoretical readings address the politics of memory; nostalgia and mourning; forms and technologies of embodied and mediated memory; modernist and postmodern critiques of historical knowledge. Note: For HISP graduate students, this iteration of the course in Spring 2023 fulfills the program requirement for HISP 520. Primary texts in Spanish (English translations available); students from other programs may opt to write in English.

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.

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.

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
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 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).

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.

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

Alex Mendes
Monday 1:00-4:00pm
ONLINEContent: 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.

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 19th 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 19th-21st 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 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 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.

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.