includes cross-listed courses
Please check the Yale Course Search site for the most up to date information, as well as the course descriptions and locations.
Spring 2023
*Coming soon to YCS*: SPAN 846: Introduction to Digital Humanities II: Algorithmic Approaches to Culture
Alex Gil, W 1:30-3:20pm
The historical and cultural record of humanity is undergoing a massive and epochal transformation into shared analog and digital realities. In Part I: Architectures of Knowledge, once those architectures are in place, new dangers and affordances open up in tandem with our ability to manipulate historical and cultural data using various forms of computation at different scales, and for different purposes. In this course, students are introduced to these dangers and affordances by exploring four broad, linked concepts: analysis, retrieval, metamorphosis, and poesis. The course combines a seminar preceded by a brief lecture and followed by a digital studio. Each week, we move through our discussions in tandem with hands-on exercises that serve to illuminate our readings and help students gain a measure of computational proficiency useful in humanities scholarship. Our approach is markedly historical, connecting our evolving present to scholarly traditions and ideas spanning continents and centuries. Students also learn to understand and evaluate a few popular and emerging methods and genres of digital humanities connected to what is now called cultural analytics. Finally, and perhaps the most important lesson of the term, students learn to collaborate with each other on common computational research tasks in the humanities. No previous computational experience is required, including Part I of this course.
SPAN 618 & 318, CPLT 968/HUMS 196/LITR 401 : The End of the World
Jesús Velasco, MW 11:35a-12:50p
In this course we study different kinds of narratives about the end of times and its consequences in Iberian and Latin American cultures. We include political, theological, social, and environmental narratives across periodizations in Iberian and Latin American cultures.
SPAN 790 Methodologies of Modern Language Teaching
Jorge Méndez-Seijas, W 1:30-3:20
Preparation for a teaching career through readings, lectures, classroom discussions, and presentations on current issues in foreign/second language acquisition theory and teaching methodology. Classroom techniques at all levels.
In Spanish.
PORT 910 Expanded Brazilian Poetry
Patrícia Lino (visiting professor), W 3:30-5:20pm
Based on the interdisciplinary and intermedial analysis of several Brazilian authors, such as Luís Aranha, Oswald de Andrade, Pagu, Julieta Barbara, Augusto de Campos, Ferreira Gullar, Álvaro or Neide de Sá, this course proposes three central ideas: a) the creation of “infraleituras”, a new type of expanded, performative, and anti-colonial essay that unfolds in the expansion of the essayist’s own bodily faculties; (b) the coincidence between intermediality and the anthropophagic practice in the development of the Brazilian avant-garde literary work; and, (c) the rehabilitation both of the hybrid status of certain canonical literary works and of works forgotten or ostracized by critics. Languages: Portuguese, English, and Spanish.
SPAN 916 & 385, CPLT 669/EMST 690/LITR 434: Cervantes and Don Quijote
This course dedicates an entire term to a close reading of the two parts of Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote de la Mancha. Announcing itself as a “true history,” yet, whose fictional devices clearly shine through, Don Quixote occupies the privileged space of first modern novel where, within its literary fabric(ations), a theory of the novel is devised. Our readings of Don Quixote examine how the classic novel inserts, parodies, and transforms all previous literary and non-literary discourses to ingeniously invent a new narrative form. To contextualize Cervantes and his literary-historic tradition, this seminar also explores questions of erotic and literary desire, the role of madness and mental health, empire and the circulation of material culture and material wealth, the Edenic narrative and ecologies of the natural world, censorship and the Inquisition, the status of representation and performance, translation, as well as the constructions of class, gender, race, and nation. We also study the legacy of Don Quixote and its quixotic narratives through contemporary art, essays, films, novels, science fiction, and television. Taught in Spanish.
*Coming soon to YCS*: SPAN 984 Digital Humanities Practical Workshop Series
Alex Gil, HTBA
Every semester, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Humanities Program will offer practical workshops in the Digital Humanities designed for graduate students. Workshops can vary between two-hour individual offerings, to series of two or four workshops on a theme or scholarly toolset. Workshops topics may include text analysis, web scraping and data mining, digital editions and exhibits, dissertation and general academic tech, advanced scholarly (re)search techniques, interactive maps and visualizations for humanistic data, data and project management, privacy and security for scholars, copyright law for digital scholarship, cultural analytics, and more. Workshops and workshop series will also be available on demand at the request of four or more graduate students. If you are planning to attend six or more Digital Humanities workshops this semester, please register for this course offering to receive proper credit. Yale will offer at least 12 workshops in the Spring semester, out of which, a minimum of six counts towards the one course credit.
This workshop series is offered in collaboration with HUMS 500. If students aren’t able to commit to six or more workshops, they should register for the HUMS 500 course number to attend these workshops on a non-credit basis.
Fall 2022
NEW
SPAN 845: Introduction to Digital Humanities I: Architectures of Knowledge
Alex Gil, MW 2:30-3:45pm, mixed graduate and undergraduate course
The cultural record of humanity is undergoing a massive and epochal transformation into shared analog and digital realities. While we are vaguely familiar with the history and realities of the analog record—libraries, archives, historical artifacts—the digital cultural record remains largely unexamined and relatively mysterious to humanities scholars. In this course you will be introduced to the broad field of Digital Humanities, theory and practice, through a stepwise exploration of the new architectures and genres of scholarly and humanistic production and reproduction in the 21st century.
The course combines a seminar, preceded by a brief lecture, and a digital studio. Every week we will move through our discussions in tandem with hands-on exercises that will serve to illuminate our readings and help you gain a measure of computational proficiency useful in humanities scholarship. You will learn about the basics of plain text, file and operating systems, data structures and internet infrastructure. You will also learn to understand, produce and evaluate a few popular genres of Digital Humanities, including, digital editions of literary or historical texts, collections and exhibits of primary sources and interactive maps. Finally, and perhaps the most important lesson of the semester, you will learn to collaborate with each other on a common research project.
No prior experience is required.
SPAN 855: Media Studies in the Amazon
Martina Broner (Visiting Professor), W 3:30-5:20pm
This course frames the interdisciplinary field of media studies as one that provides critical tools for engaging with contemporary debates in Latin America amidst ongoing ecological devastation. It focuses on the transnational Amazon rainforest as a site of interwoven social and environmental violence in order to explore the potential of media to intervene in a historically threatened territory. As we consider matters of production, circulation, and reception, we analyze visual and audiovisual objects and ask how they might expand our understanding of pressing issues such as extractivism and decolonization. Working across geographies and media, including photography, film, visual art, and virtual reality, our investigation begins in the 1970s—a moment of accelerated deforestation in the Amazon—and continues through today, when ecological crisis demands urgent attention. Discussions are structured around key disciplinary questions about media and environment, such as the embeddedness of media in economies of extraction, the conceptualization of nature as media, and the possibilities of addressing infrastructure in conjunction with representation. The course is conducted in Spanish.
SPAN 867/AFAM 867/CPLT 958/EMST 667 Black Iberia: Then and Now
Nicholas R. Jones, W 9:25-11:15am
This graduate seminar examines the variety of artistic, cultural, historical, and literary representations of black Africans and their descendants—both enslaved and free—across the vast stretches of the Luso-Hispanic world and the United States. Taking a chronological frame, the course will begin its study of Blackness in medieval and early modern Iberia and its colonial kingdoms. From there, we will examine the status of Blackness conceptually and ideologically in Asia, the Caribbean, Mexico, and South America. Toward the end of the semester, we will concentrate on black Africans by focusing on Equatorial Guinea, sub-Saharan African immigration in present-day Portugal and Spain, and the politics of Afro-Latinx culture and its identity politics in the United States. Throughout the term, we will interrogate the following topics in order to guide our class discussions and readings: bondage and enslavement; fugitivity and maroonage; animal imageries and human-animal studies; geography and maps; Black Feminism and Black Queer Studies; material and visual cultures (e.g., beauty ads; clothing; cosmetics; food; Blackface performance; royal portraiture; reality TV and music videos); the Inquisition and African diasporic religions; dispossession and immigration. Our challenging task remains the following: to see how Blackness conceptually and experientially is subversively fluid and performative, yet deceptive and paradoxical. This course will be taught in English, with all materials available in the original (English, Portuguese, Spanish) and in English translation.
SPAN 984: Digital Humanities Practical Workshop Series
Alex Gil, HTBA: times, days, and locations will vary
Every term, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese will offer practical workshops in the digital humanities designed for graduate students. Workshops can vary between two-hour individual offerings, to series of two or four workshops on a theme or scholarly toolset. If a student is planning to attend four or more workshops in a term, they should register for this course offering to receive proper credit. Workshops topics include digital editions, digital exhibits, computing fundamentals, bibliographic management, advanced scholarly research leveraging computation, interactive maps and visualizations for humanistic data, data and project management, plain text authoring, file management, privacy and security for scholars, copyright law for digital scholarship, and more. Workshops and workshop series are also available on-demand at the request of four or more graduate students.
SPAN 990: Independent Group Study in Digital Humanities
Alex Gil, HTBA: varies by group, as needed
Project-based learning and teams are at the heart of Digital Humanities (DH) pedagogy. Most projects in DH are produced by teams of scholars with complimentary skills and domain expertise, and we learn best how to produce digital scholarship while we are working on tangible outcomes. This independent course of study is designed to allow students to form a team with other graduate students to pursue a research question or sets of questions in the humanities and an appropriate research output for their scholarly project. During the course of their research and digital production, student teams are guided and mentored by an instructor and other relevant professionals at the University. Besides the option for pursuing their own original scholarly project, students may also participate in projects designed by the instructor or other faculty in the Humanities.
All Fall Courses
CPLT 515/SPAN 524: Proseminar in Comparative Literature
Jesús Velasco, W 1:30-3:20pm
Introductory proseminar for all first- and second-year students in Comparative Literature (and other interested graduate students). An introduction to key problems in the discipline of Comparative Literature, its disciplinary history, and its major theoretical and methodological debates (including philology; Marxist, structuralist, and poststructuralist approaches; world literature; translation). Emphasis on wide reading and intense discussion, in lieu of term paper. Graded Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory; offered every other year.
PORT 652/CPLT 657/PORT 352/LITR 256 Clarice Lispector: The Short Stories
K. David Jackson, M 3:30-5:20pm
This course is a seminar on the complete short stories of Clarice Lispector (1920–1977), a master of the genre and one of the major authors of twentieth-century Brazil known for existentialism, mysticism, and feminism.
HIST 811/PORT 811/AFAM 800 Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition in Brazil
Stuart Schwartz and Junia Furtado, W 1:30-3:20pm
This course examines the cultural, social, and economic aspects of slavery in Brazil from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century in an Atlantic perspective connecting Brazil to Africa. Although recognizing the enslavement of indigenous peoples, it focuses on African and Afro-Brazilian slavery. The course compares slavery in rural areas, especially on sugar and coffee plantations and in towns and cities, especially in the gold and diamond mining areas where society presented much greater diversity and miscegenation than in the enslaved-based societies of the Brazilian coast, the Caribbean, or the southern United States. In rural areas, the spread of a plantation economy accentuated the distance between the world of the free, dominated by whites, and that of the slaves, composed primarily of people born in Africa. In urban areas, a growing class of freed mulattos and blacks appeared. Urban areas were characterized by several kinds of slaves who worked by themselves as porters, female street vendors, artisans, etc. Many of these people managed to find mechanisms for reducing the weight of slavery, or even to obtain freedom. We also explore the social universe of freed blacks and mulattos.
SPAN 845: Introduction to Digital Humanities I: Architectures of Knowledge
Alex Gil, MW 2:30-3:45pm, mixed graduate and undergraduate course
The cultural record of humanity is undergoing a massive and epochal transformation into shared analog and digital realities. While we are vaguely familiar with the history and realities of the analog record—libraries, archives, historical artifacts—the digital cultural record remains largely unexamined and relatively mysterious to humanities scholars. In this course you will be introduced to the broad field of Digital Humanities, theory and practice, through a stepwise exploration of the new architectures and genres of scholarly and humanistic production and reproduction in the 21st century.
The course combines a seminar, preceded by a brief lecture, and a digital studio. Every week we will move through our discussions in tandem with hands-on exercises that will serve to illuminate our readings and help you gain a measure of computational proficiency useful in humanities scholarship. You will learn about the basics of plain text, file and operating systems, data structures and internet infrastructure. You will also learn to understand, produce and evaluate a few popular genres of Digital Humanities, including, digital editions of literary or historical texts, collections and exhibits of primary sources and interactive maps. Finally, and perhaps the most important lesson of the semester, you will learn to collaborate with each other on a common research project.
No prior experience is required.
SPAN 855: Media Studies in the Amazon
Martina Broner (Visiting Professor), W 3:30-5:20pm
This course frames the interdisciplinary field of media studies as one that provides critical tools for engaging with contemporary debates in Latin America amidst ongoing ecological devastation. It focuses on the transnational Amazon rainforest as a site of interwoven social and environmental violence in order to explore the potential of media to intervene in a historically threatened territory. As we consider matters of production, circulation, and reception, we analyze visual and audiovisual objects and ask how they might expand our understanding of pressing issues such as extractivism and decolonization. Working across geographies and media, including photography, film, visual art, and virtual reality, our investigation begins in the 1970s—a moment of accelerated deforestation in the Amazon—and continues through today, when ecological crisis demands urgent attention. Discussions are structured around key disciplinary questions about media and environment, such as the embeddedness of media in economies of extraction, the conceptualization of nature as media, and the possibilities of addressing infrastructure in conjunction with representation. The course is conducted in Spanish.
SPAN 867/AFAM 867/CPLT 958/EMST 667 Black Iberia: Then and Now
Nicholas R. Jones, W 9:25-11:15am
This graduate seminar examines the variety of artistic, cultural, historical, and literary representations of black Africans and their descendants—both enslaved and free—across the vast stretches of the Luso-Hispanic world and the United States. Taking a chronological frame, the course will begin its study of Blackness in medieval and early modern Iberia and its colonial kingdoms. From there, we will examine the status of Blackness conceptually and ideologically in Asia, the Caribbean, Mexico, and South America. Toward the end of the semester, we will concentrate on black Africans by focusing on Equatorial Guinea, sub-Saharan African immigration in present-day Portugal and Spain, and the politics of Afro-Latinx culture and its identity politics in the United States. Throughout the term, we will interrogate the following topics in order to guide our class discussions and readings: bondage and enslavement; fugitivity and maroonage; animal imageries and human-animal studies; geography and maps; Black Feminism and Black Queer Studies; material and visual cultures (e.g., beauty ads; clothing; cosmetics; food; Blackface performance; royal portraiture; reality TV and music videos); the Inquisition and African diasporic religions; dispossession and immigration. Our challenging task remains the following: to see how Blackness conceptually and experientially is subversively fluid and performative, yet deceptive and paradoxical. This course will be taught in English, with all materials available in the original (English, Portuguese, Spanish) and in English translation.
CPLT 904/SPAN 901/FILM 617/FREN 875/GMAN 617 Psychoanalysis: Key Conceptual Differences between Freud and Lacan
Moira Fradinger, W 3:30-5:20pm
Working with primary sources mainly from the Freudian and Lacanian corpuses, this seminar is an introduction to key concepts of continental psychoanalytic theory. Students gain proficiency in what has been called “the language of psychoanalysis,” as well as tools for their critical practice in humanities disciplines such as literary criticism, political theory, film studies, gender studies, theory of ideology, sociology, etc. Concepts studied include the unconscious, identification, the drive, repetition, the imaginary, the symbolic, the real, and jouissance. A central goal of the seminar is to disambiguate Freud’s corpus from Lacan’s return to it. We pay special attention to Freud’s “three” (the ego, superego, and id) in comparison to Lacan’s “three” (the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real). Depending on the interests of the group, a special unit can be added (choosing from topics such as sexuation, perversion, fetishism, psychosis, anti-psychiatry, etc.). Commentators and critics of Freud and Lacan are also consulted (Michel Arrivé, Guy Le Gaufey, Jean Laplanche, André Green, Markos Zafiropoulos, and others). Taught in English. Materials can be provided to cover the linguistic range of the group.
PORT 975/PORT 356/LAST 252/LITR 259 Concrete Poetry in Brazil & Portugal: Perspective Verbivocovisual Poetics in Theory and Practice
K. David Jackson, T 3:30-5:20pm
Brazilian concrete poetry in international perspective; production and theory of concrete poetry, translation, and criticism during the second half of the twentieth century. Brazilian concrete poets in the context of visual and concrete poetics. Representative works include “Pilot Plan” and Theory of Concrete Poetry, graphic and spatial poems, and public expositions of works. Brazilian concrete poets were among the leaders of an international neo-vanguard movement in the mid-twentieth century related to geometrical abstraction in painting. In the journals Noigandres and Invenção, and in Theory of Concrete Poetry, the Brazilians link their poetics to Pound, Mallarmé, cummings, and other inventive figures in world poetry, while relating poetry to graphic arts through reference to painting and to semiotics, including Fenollosa’s essay on use of the Chinese character. The exhibit in S. Paulo’s Museum of Modern Art in December 1956 was the beginning of the public exhibition of concrete poetry, now the topic of anthologies, websites, criticism, and museum retrospectives. Concrete poetics dominated the production of poetry in Brazil for half a century with a major effect on cultural and intellectual life.
Prerequisite: PORT 140 or equivalent.
SPAN 984: Digital Humanities Practical Workshop Series
Alex Gil, HTBA: times, days, and locations will vary
Every term, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese will offer practical workshops in the digital humanities designed for graduate students. Workshops can vary between two-hour individual offerings, to series of two or four workshops on a theme or scholarly toolset. If a student is planning to attend four or more workshops in a term, they should register for this course offering to receive proper credit. Workshops topics include digital editions, digital exhibits, computing fundamentals, bibliographic management, advanced scholarly research leveraging computation, interactive maps and visualizations for humanistic data, data and project management, plain text authoring, file management, privacy and security for scholars, copyright law for digital scholarship, and more. Workshops and workshop series are also available on-demand at the request of four or more graduate students.
SPAN 990: Independent Group Study in Digital Humanities
Alex Gil, HTBA: varies by group, as needed
Project-based learning and teams are at the heart of Digital Humanities (DH) pedagogy. Most projects in DH are produced by teams of scholars with complimentary skills and domain expertise, and we learn best how to produce digital scholarship while we are working on tangible outcomes. This independent course of study is designed to allow students to form a team with other graduate students to pursue a research question or sets of questions in the humanities and an appropriate research output for their scholarly project. During the course of their research and digital production, student teams are guided and mentored by an instructor and other relevant professionals at the University. Besides the option for pursuing their own original scholarly project, students may also participate in projects designed by the instructor or other faculty in the Humanities.
Spring 2023 (in progress)
SPAN 618/SPAN 318/CPLT 968/HUMS 196/LITR 401 The End of the World
Jesús Velasco, MW 11:35-12:50pm
In this course we study different kinds of narratives about the end of times and its consequences in Iberian and Latin American cultures. We include political, theological, social, and environmental narratives across periodizations in Iberian and Latin American cultures.
SPAN 790 Methodologies of Modern Language Teaching
Language Program Director, Schedule TBD
Preparation for a teaching career through readings, lectures, classroom discussions, and presentations on current issues in foreign/second language acquisition theory and teaching methodology. Classroom techniques at all levels.
In Spanish.
More Spring courses coming soon from Nick Jones, Alex Gil, and spring visiting professor, Patricia Lino!