Course Information

Instructor

HISP 0100 Basic Spanish

This fast-paced beginning course provides a solid foundation in the development of communicative skills in Spanish (speaking, listening comprehension, reading and writing) as well as some insight on the cultures of the Spanish-speaking world. Individual work outside of class prepares students for in-class activities focused on authentic communication. Placement: students who have never taken Spanish before, or have scored below 390 in SAT II, or below 240 in the Brown Placement Exam. Students who have taken Spanish before and those with an AP score of 3 or below must take the Brown Placement Exam. Students should check Placement and Course Description in the Undergraduate Program section of the Hispanic Studies Website. Enrollment limited to 15; 12 spaces are available for students during pre-registration. 3 spaces will be available at the start of the semester for incoming or re-admitted students who should attend the first class. Pre-enrolled students must attend the first four days of class to maintain their pre-registered status and notify the instructor in advance if they must miss any day before the 4th class when the composition of the course section is finalized.

Silvia Sobral

HISP 0300 Intermediate Spanish I

This course involves about 14-15 hours of work/week). It carries on the work initiated in HISP0110-100-200 to develop and strengthen students' linguistic, communicative, academic, and multicultural competencies. It continues to focus on the integration of grammar, vocabulary, and discourse work to advance competence and proficiency in Spanish and to support further development of communication in all the modalities. This course is framed by an inclusive perspective on learning and embraces diverse identities and communities in the Hispanic World. It fosters a community of learning among students and offers a variety of texts, themes, and topics related to students’ academic and life experiences that also help them develop professional skills. Enrollment is limited to 12. Pre-enrolled students must attend the first four days of class to maintain their pre-registered status and notify the instructor in advance if they must miss any day before the 4th class when the composition of the course section is finalized.

HISP 0400 Intermediate Spanish II

A continuation of HISP 0300. This course continues to develop and strengthen students’ linguistic, communicative, academic, and multicultural competencies. It focuses on content and language integration and creates opportunities to use the language in interdisciplinary scenarios related to diverse academic experiences. Enrollment is limited to 15. Pre-enrolled students must attend the first four days of class to maintain their pre-registered status and notify the instructor in advance if they must miss any day before the 4th class when the composition of the course section is finalized.

Prerequisite: HISP 0300 or placement: SAT II scores between 520 and 590 or Brown Placement Exam scores between 411 and 490. Students with an AP score of 3 or below must take the Brown Placement Exam. Students should check Placement and Course Description in the Undergraduate Program section of the Hispanic Studies Website.

HISP 0490A Spanish for Health Care Workers

This course provides students with the linguistic and cultural competencies necessary to communicate and help treat Spanish speaking patients with limited English. It includes a general review of pertinent grammar and vocabulary relating to health care professions, assessment, and vocabulary useful for establishing patient rapport. Students will practice communicating in common medical situations, conducting patient interviews, and increase their understanding of possible responses from patients. We will broaden knowledge of different cultures, explore health care systems/ professions in a variety of settings, and have pertinent speakers invited to class. This course does not qualify as a pre-requisite for study abroad or for HISP 0600. Students who complete 0490A successfully can continue with HISP 0500 as the next level. This is an intermediate level language course so if you have taken a 600 course or above, you will be too advanced.

HISP 0500 Advanced Spanish I

Offers comprehensive work in listening, speaking, reading, and writing, with targeted grammar review. Students work with a variety of readings (literature, newspaper articles, etc.) and with art forms such as music and film, in order to develop oral and written expression and to explore issues relevant to the Hispanic world. Students explore topics of their own interest through student-led activities and presentations. Prerequisite: HISP0400 or placement: SAT II scores between 600 and 660, Brown Placement Exam scores between 491 and 570, or AP score of 4 in language or literature. Please check Hispanic Studies website (Undergraduate Programs) for course descriptions and placement information. Enrollment limited to 15; 12 spaces are available for students during pre-registration. 3 spaces will be available at the start of the semester for incoming or re-admitted students who should attend the first class. Pre-enrolled students must attend the first four days of class to maintain their pre-registered status and notify the instructor in advance if they must miss any day before the 4th class when the composition of the course section is finalized.

HISP 0550 Intermediate Spanish for Heritage Speakers

Heritage speakers of Spanish are students who understand and speak Spanish to some degree but have not yet had formal education in Spanish. This course is specifically for students who already possess intermediate communicative skills and can communicate effectively in their home and community. This course is designed to validate, strengthen and expand the previous linguistic and cultural knowledge students bring to the classroom. Through a variety of authentic materials, students will explore issues of identity, linguistic rights, equality, and social justice, while developing their Spanish range to include formal registers, and honing their oral communication, reading and writing skills.

HISP 0600 Advanced Spanish II

Advanced-level work in speaking, listening, reading, and writing, with focused review of challenging Spanish grammar. Course materials include films, music, art works, and a variety of written texts chosen to promote class discussion and in-depth written analysis. There will be individual and group activities, including in-class presentations and creative writing projects. Prerequisite: HISP0500 or placement: SATII scores between 670 and 740, Brown Placement Exam scores between 571 and 650, or AP score of 5 in language. Enrollment limit 12. Pre-enrolled students must attend the first four classes to maintain their status and notify the instructor in advance if they must miss any day before the 4th class when the course section is finalized. Students with scores of 750 and above on the SAT II, 551 on the Brown Placement Exam, or 5 in AP Literature should consider HISP 0730-0740-0750 range.

HISP 0650 Advanced Spanish Through Literature & Film

Este curso sirve como una introducción a la literatura y la cultura del mundo hispanohablante, y a las prácticas de la lectura crítica y la escritura analítica. HISP 0650 no sólo provee un panorama histórico y contextualizado de la literatura en español, sino que también aporta estrategias de leer, pensar, y escribir sobre textos literarios y cine, preparando el/la estudiante para cursos más avanzados de literatura y cultura. A lo largo del semestre, se realiza un repaso de gramática a nivel avanzado para aclarar dudas y fortalecer el español hablado y escrito de cada estudiante.

HISP 0710F Introduction to Literary Translation

This course provides students with an opportunity to enter the fray: working as literary translators, reading texts that reflect on the nature of translation, and considering this frustrating, gratifying, and meaningful field of study and practice for themselves. It offers students an introduction to the field of translation studies (mostly via texts in English, but with discussion in Spanish) as well as a foundation of experience in the practice of literary translation, predominantly from Spanish to English, but with opportunities for translating from English to Spanish or either of these languages to another one. The course is highly interactive, with students frequently called upon to reflect on their experience as translators, and dialogue about this experience with their peers. Throughout the semester, we will engage in regular workshops, with students sharing their work and collaborating with one another throughout.

HISP 0750N Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain

Spain was one of the most culturally diverse parts of Europe throughout the Middle Ages, with Muslims, Jews, and Christians living side by side in both the Christian and Muslim kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula for nearly eight centuries (711-1492), in fluctuating peace and tension. Uninterrupted contact produced richly complex patterns of cultural exchange whose legacy is variously embraced and debated today. This first-year seminar will examine relationships between Muslims, Jews, and Christians from the perspectives of literature, music, art, architecture, archaeology, and history. While largely focusing on the centuries of co-existence, we will also consider the expulsions and forced conversions of Jews and Muslims that took place after 1492, as well as the resurgence of these communities in contemporary Spain. Throughout, students will acquire theoretical bases for understanding current interreligious conflict and for envisioning its repair. Instruction in Spanish.

Laura Bass

Merceds Vaquero

HISP 1210E History of Romance Languages

The Romance family is one of the most widely-spoken and politically important language families. The aim of this course is to introduce students to the history and linguistic characteristics of the Romance family. Our purpose is to learn the factors that led to the development of modern standard Romance languages, and provide an understanding of Romance structures and their linguistic relationships. The course covers language families; genetic relationships (family trees); typological comparison; internal versus external history; language contact and borrowing; Romance Pidgins and Creoles; Standard language versus dialect; social variation; concepts of Phonetics and Phonology; Morphology; Syntax; Semantics; Lexicon. In English.

Mercedes Vaquero

Ourida Mostefai

HISP 1290W De abuelas a nietas: escritoras españolas y latinoamericanas de 1925 a 2025 

This course delves into the literature produced by Spanish and Latin American women writers over the past century. We will explore novels, short stories, essays, diaries, and letters. These narratives form a “one hundred years of solitude” story, as many of these authors have been sidelined in a literary scene dominated by male voices. We will bridge connections across Spanish-speaking regions and explore how conditions such as gender inequality, family structures, and exile have consistently molded the discourses and works of these remarkable women. Help us unearth these writers from the dusty shelves of libraries and rescue them from invisibility. 

Our exploration will span a century-long timeline, commencing in 1925, the birth year of esteemed writers such as Carmen Martín Gaite and Rosario Castellanos. It will culminate in the contemporary world, where prominent Latin American authors like Mariana Enriquez, Liliana Colanzi, and Pilar Quintana are dedicated to illuminating and expanding the readership of these foundational figures in feminist and Spanish and Latin American literature penned by women. 

HISP 1371R Detention and Freedom in the Americas

On a continent where pretexts for the privation of liberty range from criminal activity to political beliefs to cross-border migration, creative writing - as Chilean-American writer and human rights activist Ariel Dorfman once commented - has a powerful relationship to hope and survival. In this course, we will read poetry, short fiction and testimonial writing from spaces of detention across Latin America and the U.S., asking how subjects in detention represent themselves, their aspirations to freedom, their physical and social environment, and the languages of defense and protection that ostensibly justify their detention. Primary texts by contemporary writers in Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, the U.S. and at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base; readings and class discussion in Spanish.

HISP 1371U Posthuman Latin America: Contemporary Imagination and Visions of the Future

What does it mean to be human? Does the human experience have limits? What happens when we stop being at center stage and something else, animals, plants, technology, the climate, starts occupying our place? Historically, answers to these questions have come from U.S., European and Asian culture, their film industry, literature, speculative artifacts, and academia. In this class, however, we will search to answer these questions from the perspective of Latin American, a standpoint marked by cultural multiplicity, sociopolitical complexity, uneven development, and radical imagination. Starting with Latin American historians who have written on who is and who gets to be human in the region, we will explore various aspects of the Latin American human and posthuman condition through analyzing non-textual media, literature, cultural essays, and the historical framework that produced them. We will concentrate on materials from Argentina, Bolivia,

Sebastian Antezana  Quiroga

HISP 2160M Early Modern Madrid: The Cultural Creation of a Court Capital

This seminar studies Madrid's transformation from a secondary market town into the epicenter of Spain's global monarchy under the Spanish Habsburgs and how that transformation fueled, and was fueled by, literary and artistic production. The intersection of the court and the city that rapidly expanded around it made Madrid not only Spain’s imperial capital, but its cultural capital as well through a confluence of overlapping and competing social interests. Topics include: negotiations of the global and the local in historical chronicles and municipal festivities; the centrality of the theater in urban socialization; the use of poetry for self-fashioning; the transmission of political news. We will study authors canonical (e.g., Lope de Vega, Calderón, Zayas) and lesser known (e.g., Liñán y Verdugo). While Madrid will be our focus, we will give comparative consideration to other cities of the early modern world.

HISP 2351E Book-Objects

“To survive”, wrote Mexican writer-turned-artist Ulises Carrión in 1979, “books need to change their form”. This seminar looks at a century of experiments with the form of the book in Latin America, attending to shifting relations between form, content, materiality, and circulation. We will look at avant-garde and neo-avant-garde poetry (Girondo and Cendrars through de Campos and Martínez); books that mimic forms of mapping and travel (Concha Méndez, Bellessi, Thenón, Obrigado); plays with the shape of the book by some established writers (Cortázar, Arguedas, Piglia, Saer); and experiments with different forms of production and circulation (cartoneras, graphic novels, photo-books).

HISP 2990A Learning & Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language

This course provides practicing and prospective teachers of Spanish as a second language (L2) with an introduction to the field of second language acquisition (SLA) and its application to language teaching methodology and pedagogy, with a specific focus on the teaching of Spanish. In addition to the theoretical discussion, there is a significant practical component to the course so you can start (or continue) to develop skills and materials for your own work as an instructor at Brown University and beyond.