A beginning course designed for students who wish to start their study of Portuguese and have no proficiency in another Romance language. The four language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing are developed at the basic level.
Prerequisites: a score of 0-279 on the department's Spanish as a Second Language Placement exam. An introduction to Spanish communicative competence, with stress on basic oral interaction, reading, writing, and cultural knowledge. Principal objectives are to understand and produce commonly used sentences to satisfy immediate needs; ask and answer questions about personal details such as where we live, people we know and things we have; interact in a simple manner with people who speak clearly, slowly and are ready to cooperate; and understand simple and short written and audiovisual texts in Spanish. All Columbia students must take Spanish language courses (UN 1101-3300) for a letter grade.
Prerequisites: PORT W1101 or the equivalent. A course designed to acquaint students with the Portuguese verbal, prepositional, and pronominal systems. As a continuation of Elementary Portuguese I (PORT W1101), this course focuses on the uses of characteristic forms and expressions of the language as it is spoken and written in Brazil today.
Prerequisites: SPAN UN1101 or a score of 280-379 on the department’s Spanish as a Second Language Placement exam. An intensive introduction to Spanish language communicative competence, with stress on basic oral interaction, reading, writing and cultural knowledge as a continuation of SPAN UN1101. The principal objectives are to understand sentences and frequently used expressions related to areas of immediate relevance; communicate in simple and routine tasks requiring a direct exchange of information on familiar matters; describe in simple terms aspects of our background and personal history; understand the main point, the basic content, and the plot of filmic as well as short written texts. All Columbia students must take Spanish language courses (UN 1101-3300) for a letter grade.
Prerequisites: Scoring at this level on the department’s Spanish as a Heritage Language Placement test (https://columbia-barnard.vega-labs.com).
The principal aim of SPAN UN1108 is to build upon and further develop the informal knowledge of Spanish that heritage learners bring to the classroom—usually from family and neighborhood exposure to the language—and cultivate formal speaking, listening, reading, and writing abilities. Students are not expected to have any academic training in written Spanish prior to enrolling in this course.
Spanish heritage language courses at Columbia/Barnard focus on the development of communicative abilities and literacy from sociolinguistic and sociocultural approaches. Throughout the semester, students will be reviewing spelling patterns, building vocabulary, acquiring and effectively using learning strategies, and strengthening composition skills in Spanish. Cultural projects and readings reinforce learners’ understanding of the multiple issues related to Hispanic cultures in the United States and in other Spanish-speaking societies.
An extensive introduction to the Catalan language with an emphasis on oral communication as well as the reading and writing practice that will allow the student to function comfortably in a Catalan environment.
Prerequisites: knowledge of Spanish or another Romance language. An intensive beginning language course in Brazilian Portuguese with emphasis on Brazilian culture through multimedia materials related to culture and society in contemporary Brazil. Recommended for students who have studied Spanish or another Romance language. The course is the equivalent of two full semesters of elementary Portuguese with stress on reading and conversing, and may be taken in place of PORT W1101-W1102. For students unable to dedicate the time needed cover two semesters in one, the regularly paced sequence PORT W1101-W1102 is preferable.
Prerequisites: CATL W1120. The first part of Columbia University´s comprehensive intermediate Catalan sequence. The main objectives of this course are to continue developing communicative competence - reading, writing, speaking and listening comprehension - and to further acquaint students with Catalan cultures.
Prerequisites: PORT W1120 or the equivalent. General review of grammar, with emphasis on self-expression through oral and written composition, reading, conversation, and discussion.
Prerequisites: SPAN UN1102 or SPAN UN1120 or or a score of 380-449 in the departments Placement Examination. An intensive course in Spanish language communicative competence, with stress on oral interaction, reading, writing, and culture as a continuation of SPAN UN1102 or SPAN UN1120. All Columbia students must take Spanish language courses (UN 1101-3300) for a letter grade.
Prerequisites: CATL UN2101 or equivalent Catalan 1202 is the second part of Columbia Universitys intermediate Catalan sequence. Course goals are to enhance student exposure to various aspects of Catalan culture and to consolidate and expand reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills.
Prerequisites: PORT UN1120 or PORT UN1320 or the equivalent. General review of grammar, with emphasis on self-expression through oral and written composition, reading, conversation, and discussion.
Prerequisites: SPAN UN2101 or a score of 450-625 in the departments Placement Examination. An intensive course in Spanish language communicative competence, with stress on oral interaction, reading, writing and culture as a continuation of SPAN UN2101. All Columbia students must take Spanish language courses (UN 1101-3300) for a letter grade.
Prerequisites: SPAN UN2101 or a score of 450-625 on the Department’s placement examination. This is an intensive course in Spanish language communicative competence with an emphasis on oral interaction, reading, writing, and culture at an Intermediate II level with focus on health-related topics in the Spanish-speaking world. In an increasingly interconnected world, and in multilingual global cities such as New York City, the study of a foreign language is fundamental not only in the field of the humanities but also in the natural sciences. This interdisciplinary course analyzes the intersection between these two disciplines through the study of health-related topics in Iberian and Latin American cultural expressions (literature, film, documentaries, among other sources) in order to explore new critical perspectives across both domains. Students will learn health-related vocabulary and usage-based grammar in Spanish. Students will develop a cultural understanding of medicine, illness, and treatment in the Spanish-speaking world. Finally, students will be able to carry out specific collaborative tasks in Spanish with the aim of integrating language, culture, and health. * This course fulfills the last semester of the foreign language requirement. Therefore, students who have taken SPAN UN 2101 (Intermediate Spanish I), or have a score of 450-625 on the Department’s placement exam, and are interested in health-related topics may proceed and enroll in SPAN UN 2103 (Intermediate Spanish II: Health-Related Topics in the Spanish-Speaking World). Pre-med and pre-health students, as well as those students majoring in the natural sciences—including biology, general chemistry, organic chemistry, biochemistry, and physics—will be given registration priority. All Columbia students must take Spanish language courses (UN 1101-3300) for a letter grade.
This is an intensive course in Spanish language communicative competence with an emphasis on oral interaction, reading, writing, and culture at an Intermediate II level focused on climate discourse and environmental topics. Prerequisites: SPAN UN2101 (Intermediate Spanish I) or a score of 450-625 on the Department’s placement examination. This course fulfills the last semester of the foreign language requirement. After SPAN UN2104, students can continue learning Spanish and its cultures in SPAN UN3300.
This transdisciplinary course blends together Spanish language/s, Hispanic cultures, and climate in the field of the broadly defined ‘Climate Humanities’. It examines how climate change is discursively framed in the media, literature, and other cultural productions in the Spanish-speaking world including the US. We will explore how it becomes reframed as it travels from the scientific sphere to the social spaces where public opinion is negotiated, and how those linguistic and textual strategies shape and are shaped by the political economy of climate debates, that is, by the specific geopolitical and social positions of the different stake-holders. The purpose of this course is, first, to explore the possibilities of a new space at the interface between language/sociolinguistics, cultural studies, and environmental discourse to raise awareness of the challenges faced when we position ourselves outside of our communities of scholarly practice. Secondly, the course aims at providing students with tools to perform a mediating role between specialized knowledge production in Spanish and the public. From a multiliteracies framework, we will offer a language and content-based course with spaces for discussion of key emerging issues related to environmental justice using a critical discourse methodology while we continue honing students’ skills in Spanish through climate-related vocabulary and usage-based grammar.
Prerequisites: PORT UN1102 or PORT UN1320. Prerequisites: this course is an intensive and fast-paced coverage of both PORT UN2101 and PORT UN2102. Students MUST demonstrate a strong foundation in Portuguese and meet the following REQUIREMENT: A- or higher in PORT UN1102 or PORT UN1320. If you fulfill the above requirement, you do not need the instructors permission to register. HOWEVER the instructor will additionally assess student proficiency during the Change of Program Period. Students who do not have the necessary proficiency level may not remain in this course. This course replaces the sequence PORT UN2101-PORT UN2102.
Prerequisites: This course is an intensive and fast-paced coverage of both SPAN UN2101 and SPAN UN2102. Students MUST demonstrate a strong foundation in Spanish and meet the following REQUIREMENTS: a score ABOVE 480 on the Departments Placement Examination; or A- or higher in SPAN UN1120. If you fulfill the above requirements, you do not need the instructors permission to register. HOWEVER, the instructor will additionally assess student proficiency during the Change of Program Period. Students who do not have the necessary proficiency level may not remain in this course. Replaces the sequence SPAN UN2101-SPAN UN2102. All Columbia students must take Spanish language courses (UN 1101-3300) for a letter grade.
Corequisites: PORT UN1220 An intensive exposure to advanced points of Portuguese grammar and structure through written and oral practice, along with an introduction to the basic principles of academic composition in Portuguese. This course is required for the concentration in Portuguese Studies. This course is intended to improve Portuguese language skills in grammar, comprehension, and critical thinking through an archive of texts from literature, film, music, newspapers, critical reception and more. To do so, we will work through Portuguese-speaking communities and cultures from Brazil, to Portugal and Angola, during the twentieth and twenty-first century, to consider the mode in which genre, gender and sexuality materialize and are codified, disoriented, made, unmade and refigured through cultural productions, bodies, nation and resistant vernaculars of aesthetics and performance, always attentive to the intersections of gender with class and racism.
Prerequisites: SPAN UN2102 or AP score of 4 or 5; or SAT score. An intensive exposure to advanced points of Spanish grammar and structure through written and oral practice, along with an introduction to the basic principles of academic composition in Spanish. Each section is based on the exploration of an ample theme that serves as the organizing principle for the work done in class (Please consult the Directory of Classes for the topic of each section.) This course is required for the major and the concentration in Hispanic Studies. Formerly SPAN W3200 and SPAN BC3004. If you have taken either of these courses before you cannot take SPAN UN3300. All Columbia students must take Spanish language courses (UN 1101-3300) for a letter grade.
Prerequisites: SPAN UN2102 or AP score of 4 or 5; or SAT score. An intensive exposure to advanced points of Spanish grammar and structure through written and oral practice, along with an introduction to the basic principles of academic composition in Spanish. Each section is based on the exploration of an ample theme that serves as the organizing principle for the work done in class (Please consult the Directory of Classes for the topic of each section.) This course is required for the major and the concentration in Hispanic Studies. Formerly SPAN W3200 and SPAN BC3004. If you have taken either of these courses before you cannot take SPAN UN3300. All Columbia students must take Spanish language courses (UN 1101-3300) for a letter grade.
Prerequisites: SPAN UN2102 or AP score of 4 or 5; or SAT score. An intensive exposure to advanced points of Spanish grammar and structure through written and oral practice, along with an introduction to the basic principles of academic composition in Spanish. Each section is based on the exploration of an ample theme that serves as the organizing principle for the work done in class (Please consult the Directory of Classes for the topic of each section.) This course is required for the major and the concentration in Hispanic Studies. Formerly SPAN W3200 and SPAN BC3004. If you have taken either of these courses before you cannot take SPAN UN3300. All Columbia students must take Spanish language courses (UN 1101-3300) for a letter grade.
Prerequisites: SPAN UN2102 or AP score of 4 or 5; or SAT score. An intensive exposure to advanced points of Spanish grammar and structure through written and oral practice, along with an introduction to the basic principles of academic composition in Spanish. Each section is based on the exploration of an ample theme that serves as the organizing principle for the work done in class (Please consult the Directory of Classes for the topic of each section.) This course is required for the major and the concentration in Hispanic Studies. Formerly SPAN W3200 and SPAN BC3004. If you have taken either of these courses before you cannot take SPAN UN3300. All Columbia students must take Spanish language courses (UN 1101-3300) for a letter grade.
Prerequisites: L course: enrollment limited to 15 students. Completion of language requirement, third-year language sequence (W3300). Provides students with an overview of the cultural history of the Hispanic world, from eighth-century Islamic and Christian Spain and the pre-Hispanic Americas through the late Middle Ages and Early Modern period until about 1700, covering texts and cultural artifacts from both Spain and the Americas.
This course surveys cultural production of Spain and Spanish America from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Students will acquire the knowledge needed for the study of the cultural manifestations of the Hispanic world in the context of modernity. Among the issues and events studied will be the Enlightenment as ideology and practice, the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, the wars of Spanish American independence, the fin-de-siecle and the cultural avant-gardes, the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century (Spanish Civil War, the Mexican and Cuban revolutions), neoliberalism, globalization, and the Hispanic presence in the United States. The goal of the course is to study some key moments of this trajectory through the analysis of representative texts, documents, and works of art. Class discussions will seek to situate the works studied within the political and cultural currents and debates of the time. All primary materials, class discussion, and assignments are in Spanish. This course is required for the major and the concentration in Hispanic Studies.
Each week, a historical period is studied in connection to a particular theme of ongoing cultural expression. While diverse elements of popular culture are included, fiction is privileged as a source of cultural commentary. Students are expected to assimilate the background information but are also encouraged to develop their own perspective and interest, whether in the social sciences, the humanities (including the fine arts), or other areas.
What role does speculation play in subverting the past, rethinking the present, and building different futures within Latin American and Latinx communities? The field of Speculative Fiction uses multiple forms of arts and media to craft fictional imaginaries that have become a vehicle to narrate historical horrors (Merla-Watson & Olguín) and criticize versions of modernity imposed across the Americas (Colanzi). Nonetheless, as Gaspar de Alba claims, these artifacts remain both alien and Indigenous to the West. While these speculative imaginaries use the codes of non-mimetic fiction, such as space-time travel, creatures, robots, alternative realities, and genetics; they also expand upon them to address struggles of the Americas’ history of colonialism, dispossession, and mestizaje.
Throughout the seminar, we will engage in a cross-cultural trajectory of multiple forms of representation, such as literature, comics, film, music, and performance within the US-Mexico border, the Caribbean, and the Southern Cone. From Anzaldúa’s Borderlands to Queer Futurities. We will navigate movies like
La Llorona
and
Sleep Dealer
, and representations in Marvel, DC, and Star Wars universes. From transdisciplinary works by Rita Indiana and Luis Carlos Barragán to artwork by Marion Matínez, Amalia Ortiz, and Matías Bergara. We will reflect on how to elucidate Futurisms from mestizos, indigenous, and afro-caribbean identities. Likewise, fictions about waste, viruses, and flesh will display critical takes regarding political tensions and the environmental crisis.
This undergraduate seminar prioritizes hands-on and discussion-based methodologies like group activities and active participation to deepen multiliteracy competencies, public and virtual humanities, and underlying communication abilities of second-language acquisition. The students will be able to transfer critical thinking, decision-making, and research skills into the development of a scaffolded multimedia project, which critically reflects on units’ topics, primary and secondary sources, historical and cross-cultural contexts. This multimedia project will also build an open database that gives an afterlife to each student's contributions to an emerging field and a growing community of LatAm/Latinx SpF Arts & Media. The course is intended for students majoring in Hispanic Cultures and/or Comparative Literature and Society. Advanced Spanish Language level is a requirement, but the seminar is taught in English.
This graduate seminar serves as a continuation of SPPO GR6001 (“Theory and Practice of Second Language Teaching”) and it is intended for in-service instructors of language, and language and content courses at the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. It focuses on the application in the second language (SL) classroom of the pedagogical principles reviewed in the previous semester, with emphasis on methodological approaches and applied techniques.
Students will be directly mentored regarding the classroom treatment and presentation of grammatical, lexical, socio-cultural, and pragmatic aspects of the language in the SL classroom. From a communicative approach and beyond, they will also continue to engage with basic teaching techniques such as lesson planning, use of the target language, technology integration, task design, and the use of written and oral authentic materials. They will learn practically how to promote the development of students’ abilities for literacy and critical thinking. Finally, they will be carefully guided through the actual design and implementation of testing and assessment measures for the course they are teaching. In this seminar, we will also analyze real and potential case scenarios that will/may arise in the classroom and we will consider tactics to resolve problems that typically occur. Reflective teaching practices (teachers as learners of teaching, dynamics of classroom communication, the role of teachers’ beliefs about pedagogical practices) will be revisited and rethought.
This course focuses on historical documents, literary works, visual productions, and artwork born out of the experience of confinement across different regions of the Caribbean and its diaspora from the 19th century onward. It particularly examines how diverse iterations of the prison—as both a concrete and a fictional space, a trope, and an ideological apparatus—are ingrained in the (un)making of Caribbean “national bodies.” Likewise, the course will explore a varied archive of media and aesthetics revolving around the representation of ‘the body in prison’ in its different constituencies (prisoner, visitor, jailer, tourist, etc.). This will help us understand the prison experience not exclusively as a site of trauma but also as a critical point of encounter between Caribbean intellectual and nationalistic discourses, community-based activism, and ultimately capital. By interrogating the Foucauldian conflation of the penitentiary system and power’s dominant ideology, we examine the paradoxes of Caribbean political imagination as underpinned by the processes of forced labor, corporal discipline and commodification, exile, and resistance. We will pay special attention to questions about the roles of race, gender, and sexuality in Caribbean politics and diasporic communities that emerge at this manifold crossroad.
Students will become familiar with works from the Hispanic, French, and Anglophone Caribbeans and their diasporas, ranging from the memoirs of Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture and the archival collection of Puerto Rican activist Lolita Lebrón’s imprisonment to the artwork currently being produced from prison by Cuban Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara. Concurrently, we will read critics and theorists such as Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Elaine Scarry, Diana Paton, Frantz Fanon, and Fernando Ortiz, among others. To complement our seminar discussions, the course will also host a series of talks on the works of contemporary Caribbean scholars and artivists.
In recent decades scholars have focused their attention on a precise aspect of the Iberian expansion between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries: the vast circulation of overseas objects as goods, with the consequent enrichment of the European collections, the birth of the Wonder Cabinets etc. Beyond these physical movements of new items, from Peru, Brazil, India, New Spain, Sierra Leone, or the Philippines, however, another parallel and equally significant process took place: the production and circulation of texts documenting, describing and analyzing the diversity of these creations, the qualitative exceptionality of their creators abilities, their mythologies, their material specificities, and their possible aesthetic, theological, or political links as well as their key role in the Iberian domination process itself. These two movements between texts and images are intimately intertwined: as more items were being produced overseas, more texts were being devoted to their existence and production; then as more texts were being written,published, and read, more objects were being desired, commissioned, invented, and shipped. The seminar will explore the variety of these sources -variety of genres (chronicles, histories, inventories, grammars, dictionaries, legal or inquisitorial processes), variety of authorships (conquistadors, missionaries, ambassadors, travelers, visitadores, cronistas, naturalists, historians, collectors, artists) etc.- in order to examine the relationship between textual and visual production in Early Modernity. The study of this unexpected literature of art will be continuously accompanied with the discussion of the actual artifacts commented in the sources. We will also consider if there are local specificities in the production of such texts: for instance, is the impressive amount of sources exclusively related to the American (New Spain, Brazil, Peru...) artistic processes understandable within a broader Iberian perspective or is there something specific in the observation and examination of the American aesthetics?
Prerequisites: graduate standing. Students register in this course while preparing their M.Phil. examinations and prospectus--usually in the fall and spring of their third year.
Prerequisites: graduate standing. Students register in this course while preparing their M.Phil. examinations and prospectus--usually in the fall and spring of their third year.
Prerequisites: graduate standing. Students register in this course while preparing their M.Phil. examinations and prospectus--usually in the fall and spring of their third year.