An introduction to the fundamentals of the Spanish language, with an emphasis on active learning and a focus on comprehension, speaking, reading and writing skills. Students will develop communicative and intercultural competence by exploring the diversity of Spanish-speaking communities around the world. No previous knowledge of Spanish required.

Spanish 2 offers a slightly more accelerated introduction to the fundamentals of Spanish language for students with some previous knowledge of Spanish (1 or 2 years of HS instruction or equivalent). The course emphasizes active learning, focusing on comprehension, speaking, reading and writing skills. Students will develop communicative and intercultural competence by exploring the diversity of Spanish-speaking communities around the world.

Spanish 3 is an intermediate language course intended for students who have taken about 3 years of high school Spanish (or equivalent). It is designed to provide students with an active learning experience as they strengthen their language skills and develop their intercultural competency. Students advance their proficiency in the areas of comprehension, speaking, reading and writing. Cultural material is integrated into these four areas to expand knowledge and cultural awareness of Spanish-speaking communities in the United States and around the world.

This course provides students with an active learning experience as they strengthen their language skills and develop their cultural competency. This course introduces students to advanced grammatical structures and focuses on specialized vocabulary used in professional fields including business, health sciences, and law. It emphasizes the development of comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing. Cultural material is integrated into these four areas to expand students' knowledge of Spanish-speaking communities in the United States and around the world.

This course develops students' writing and editing skills in Spanish by exploring various types of writing (descripción, narración, reportaje, exposición and argumentación) and the processes needed to develop these styles of composition. As part of the mastery of the skills necessary for writing in Spanish, the course incorporates a review of key and complex grammatical structures.

This course combines linguistic functions and structures with culture through an integration of listening, speaking, reading and writing activities. The course concentrates on improving oral fluency in Spanish by using the topics of Spanish and Latin American films, and their illustration of language in cultural context for class discussion.

SPAN 205 introduces students to different variations (or dialects) of the Spanish language, paying special attention to the Spanish spoken in the United States (also known as Spanglish). It explores Spanglish through the voices of its speakers, as well as through texts and videos, facilitating reflections on why some varieties of Spanish, such as Spanglish, are perceived as less prestigious. The course also incorporates regular activities that practice intermediate and advanced grammar topics.

This course examines the importance of various food products in the development of the original civilizations of the American continent, and the impact that the crops imported by the colonizers have had on the destruction of human cultures and natural ecosystems. Crops native to the Americas (corn, potato, tomato, squash, beans, cacao) and those introduced during colonial times (sugarcane, rice, coffee, bananas), have defined the modern world's foodscapes and have shaped the culture, the history, the economy and the politics of countries around the world. The course will focus on corn in particular, examining its farming, harvesting and cooking methods throughout history, reviewing religious myths and cultural traditions connected to it, and studying its presence and relevance in today's food industry and in our daily lives.

This course introduces students to the culture and civilization of Spain with emphasis on the history, art and prevalent cultural myths and practices integral to the development of the Spanish nation. This course considers the relevance of these cultural elements within an Hispanic context and a global perspective.

This course introduces the student to the culture and civilization of Latin America, with an emphasis on the history, visual art, music, and prevalent cultural myths integral to the civilizations and cultures of the region. The course considers the relevance of these cultural elements within a Hispanic context and a larger world perspective.

SPAN 310 offers in-depth study of literary and cultural topics in the Spanish-speaking world that are interdisciplinary in nature, multiregional in approach, and genre inclusive. As such, it incorporates short story, poetry, drama, essay, and film, and it covers several regions, including but not limited to the Southern Cone, Central America, the Caribbean, and Spain. Potential topics for this rubric are advanced culture courses, literatures of the periphery, narratives of the migration experience, advanced translation, linguistics, or any course which is interdisciplinary in nature. In addition to learning about the concrete topic of the class, students develop their critical skills, and improve their speaking, reading, and writing skills in Spanish. Because content will change, this course may be repeated for credit.

A panoramic survey of the literature of the Americas. The texts studied in the course reflect literary developments up to the present. Works to be discussed illustrate cultural elements that are evidenced in today's society. Latine Literature written in the United States may also be included.

A panoramic survey of Spanish literature from the early modern period to the present. Works to be discussed illustrate cultural, political, and social issues critical in the development of Spanish literature. This course has a multimedia component.

This course considers the main cultural and literary issues of the Hispanic world as represented in the short story. Writers from both sides of the Atlantic are studied with emphasis on the close reading and analysis of the texts.

This course examines poetry as an authentic expression of Hispanic literature. Writers from Spain and Latin America are studied with emphasis on the close reading and analysis of their poems, the study of meter, rhyme, and other elements of prosody, as well as writing critically about poetry.

An overview of Spanish cinema since the Civil War to the present. All films are studied in reference to the historical developments in Spain from 1939 to the present. Works by Berlanga, Buñuel, Saura, and Almodóvar are screened. Course includes required screening lab.

This course surveys Latin American cinema, with a particular emphasis on contemporary films. The acquisition of technical vocabulary will facilitate a careful examination of the selected works. Together with literary, critical, and theoretical texts, this analysis will lead to a broader discussion about the key cultural and social issues of the region.

This course covers approximately 200 years of Spanish drama. Students read complete dramas from several of Spain's most prolific playwrights while covering the major literary movements and tendencies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This course explores major theatre pieces of the twentieth century and is organized around important theatrical centers in Latin America and the study of terminology related to the theatre. The two largest units focus on Argentina and Mexico, but the course also covers plays from Chile, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and some Chicano works. The growing importance of performance theory and art is included in the coursework.

This course explores the relationship between documentary film and social movements in Latin America and Spain. Students analyze a series of 20th and 21st century social documentaries in their respective historical and political contexts, paying special attention to the techniques utilized by filmmakers and audiences to intervene in the public sphere. In the process, they become familiar with the conventions of different schools of documentary filmmaking in Spain and Latin America as well as the rationale behind the use of specific film techniques. This course fosters community-engaged learning and it satisfies the experiential learning graduation requirement. It combines film theory with hands-on experience in documentary filmmaking. Students expand on the concepts discussed in class by learning how to produce short documentary films that explore a social issue that affects Tacoma. As such this course requires significant out-of-class engagement with our local communities.

A study of the major genres of Hispanic literature through close analyses of selected masterpieces. This class prepares the student for more advanced studies in literary and cultural studies.

This course explores the human experience of migration, exile, and/or diaspora by offering an overview of some of the more significant migration processes within the Spanish-speaking world, and by exploring the social, political, historical, economic and intellectual implications of those processes. The class consists of close readings of literary works in several genres, including poetry, plays, short stories and essays, and the screening of several films. It also includes readings on cultural aspects of and theoretical approaches to this phenomenon. Readings and visual texts are in Spanish and/or English, and all discussion and testing is in Spanish.

How do new ways of seeing and being seen shape the divergent experiences of modernity in Latin America? This is the basic question that SPAN 322 asks by examining a series of case studies that roughly span the last two hundred years of its history. "Modernity" is an object of much debate, but might be provisionally defined as the competing accounts of the major sociopolitical, economic, and cultural processes shaping our world. Traditionally, the foundational literary works of the so-called "lettered city" have been the sources privileged by scholars to understand Latin American modernities. Drawing on recent scholarship, this course adopts the interdisciplinary approach known as "visual culture" in order to understand how emergent technologies and their attendant practices have been instrumental in constructing and critiquing particular configurations of power. These may include photography, pavilions at international expositions, museums, performance art, and multimedia spectacles.

This course will provide students with an overview of Iberian feminism from a transatlantic perspective (Spain-the Americas). First, we will examine the origins of Iberian feminisms, paying special attention to transatlantic literary networks and spaces. In doing so, we will discuss key concepts around feminism and/or women's writing: the struggle over women's rights; women as a labor force and consumers; models of gender identity and nation building; sexual liberation, etc. Second, we will analyze the major global debates and challenges within contemporary feminisms (transfeminism, decolonial feminisms, ecofeminism or pinkwashing) and their articulation in the Iberian context. We will cover a variety of feminist artifacts and practices (short fiction, manifestos, performance, memoirs, poetry, strikes, etc.) with emphasis on how and why these texts often blur genre conventions.

This course analyzes the relationship between art, race, science, and sexuality in Latin America. In particular, we study the development of Eugenics in Mexico in the first three decades of the 20th century. The course is divided into four sections: first, we explore the historical development of Eugenics. Then, we examine the history of Eugenics in Latin America. Next, we focus our investigation on the Mexican School of Eugenics. In the final section, we scrutinize the influence of Eugenics in the 1925 and 1932 Mexican debates concerning art, literature, and nationalism -- emphasizing the connection between body taxonomies and artistic productions.

This course surveys roughly one hundred years of Latin American film, from 1896 to the present, with a focus on feature-length narrative films. As its title suggests -- a riff on the title of Gabriel García Márquez's celebrated novel -- its overarching theme is the role film has played in shaping collective identities (national, racial, sexual, etc.) throughout the region. That is, this course tracks the development of film as a technology and as a form of artistic expression in Latin America, as well as the social, political, and economic realities that it represents and shapes.

This course explores the diversity of the Latina/o/x/e experiences and introduces students to the originality of artistic and cultural expressions of the Latinx communities in the United States, focusing on texts written originally in Spanish. Plays, performance pieces, short stories, novels, testimonies, poems, essays, films, documentaries, and blogs help students understand the complex and often silenced histories of the U.S. Latinx population. Thus, literature becomes a place where identities and ideologies are articulated, debated and contested. Through readings and discussions, students explore questions related to community building, migration and diaspora, racism and racial relations, transnational politics, discourses of power and privilege, and the intersections of sexuality, gender, race, and class. Most readings are in Spanish, with some in English and Spanglish. Discussion, writing assignments and tests will be conducted in Spanish.

Synthesis of various aspects of literary studies. Topics to meet special needs. Since content changes, this course may be repeated for credit.

An intensive study of selected works reflecting the intellectual, political, and aesthetic changes in Spain from 1140 to 1499 AD.

This course examines the relationship between culture and politics in nineteenth century Latin America. Studying foundational works of Latin American literature alongside other, oft-ignored cultural artifacts, it traces the role of the people in the rise of the modern nation-state.

A survey of Spanish literature between its two golden ages; close reading of selected texts; consideration of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Realism in a Spanish context; and examination of interplay among society, politics, art, and literature.

In this course, students examine how post-dictatorial Spain (from 1975 to present) remembers competing accounts of a recent violent past. First, the class analyzes a series of transatlantic cultural artifacts that constructed the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the anti-Francoist resistance as international battles against Fascism. Second, the class concentrates on the ways in which contemporary memory artifacts (films, graphic novels, memoirs, etc.) thematize ideological battles in gender, sexual, and racial terms, paying close attention to the divergent articulations of these conflicts by peripheral nationalisms within Spain (Catalonia, Basque Country and Galicia).

This course focuses on the exploitation of the land and the people of Latin America by the global agro-industrial complex, as seen through its literature. Students examine three novels that detail the power dynamics at play in the growing and harvesting of cash crops (in particular sugar, coffee, and bananas) grown in a plantation system exclusively for exportation. These narratives depict the basic tensions that both define and undermine their communities, and serve as allegories of the region's past and present. We read, discuss, and research these novels alongside other textual and cultural artifacts, as well as a corpus of contemporary scholarship, in order to understand both specific historical moments as well as the broader sociopolitical processes common to the region that we know today as Latin America. Central to the course is the power dynamics at play in the construction of historical narratives, racial justice, and collective memory; the systems of oppression that privilege certain stories while silencing others; the resistance to remembering a violent past that continues to shape the political present; and the potential of memory as a tool for resistance.

This course surveys roughly one hundred years of Latin American film, from 1896 to the present, with a focus on feature-length narrative films. As its title suggests -- a riff on the title of Gabriel García Márquez's celebrated novel -- its overarching theme is the role film has played in shaping collective identities(national, racial, sexual, etc.) throughout the region. That is, this course tracks the development of film as a technology and as a form of artistic expression in Latin America, as well as the social, political, and economic realities that it represents and shapes.

This course provides students with an overview of Iberian feminism from a transatlantic perspective (Spain-the Americas). The class starts with an examination of the origins of Iberian feminisms that pays special attention to transatlantic literary networks and spaces. In the process, students are introduced to key concepts around feminism and/or women's writing: the struggle over women's rights; women as a labor force and consumers; models of gender identity and nation building; sexual liberation, etc. The second part of the course is centered around the major global debates within contemporary feminisms (transfeminism, decolonial feminisms, ecofeminism or pinkwashing) and their articulation in the Iberian context. This course covers a variety of feminist artifacts and practices (short fiction, manifestos, performance, memoirs, poetry, strikes, etc.) with emphasis on how and why these texts often blur genre conventions.

Independent study is available to those students who wish to continue their learning in an area after completing the regularly offered courses in that area.

Independent Study is available to students wishing to complete study in a topic not covered by a regular course.