Course Descriptions

SPAN 440: Topics in Transatlantic Hispanic Studies

"Más que un deporte: Soccer and Society in Spain and Latin America"

Instructor: Sean Gullickson

MW 02:00 PM - 03:15 PM

Few cultural phenomena have the global reach and impact of soccer. 1.5 billion people around the world watched the 2022 FIFA World Cup final between France and Argentina. The upcoming World Cup in North America is expected to have an economic impact the same size as El Salvador’s annual GDP. The most-followed accounts on Instagram are those of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, two superstars of the game. It is a passion for billions around the world, but particularly in Spain and Latin America where fútbol has important ties to culture, literature, politics, economics, and history. This course will seek to map out and analyze these connections between sport and society. From colonialism to el clásico, the Dirty War to narco-soccer, the Hand of God to the hand of a dictator, we will explore the passion, power and purpose of soccer in the Spanish-speaking world. Readings from canonical authors like Galeano and Marías will be paired with documentaries, podcasts, journalistic pieces and, of course, soccer games from throughout history. Together, we will use these materials and our in-class collaboration to answer big questions about soccer’s place in Latin America and Spain.

SPAN 441: Special Topics in Spanish Literature & Culture

"Studies in Medieval and Post-Medieval Cultural Production"

Instructor: Isidro Rivera

TuTh 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM

The United States is the second-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, and approximately 20% of the population – 68 million people – identify as Latine. The experiences and cultural production of this group are crucial to our understanding of the Spanish-speaking world writ large as well as to our development as citizens of Kansas, the US and the world. 

This course will explore representations of the Latine experience in the United States through a variety of texts and media, from short stories to film, graphic novels to visual art, music to independent journalism. Our primary focus will be contemporary rather than historical. Covering topics like belonging, migration narratives, pop culture, Spanglish, and politics, we will seek to center the range of Latine voices that have shaped and continue to shape the cultural and social realities of the US and the world.

SPAN 442: Special Topics in Latin American Literature & Culture

"Latin American Telenovelas – The Power of Pop Culture"

Instructor: Ana Laura Marques

TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am

This course explores Latin American telenovelas as a dynamic lens for understanding contemporary societies across the region. Through selected episodes from Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and other Latin American countries, students examine how these culturally influential narratives shape public debates on class, past, race, gender, family, and national identity. The course analyzes narrative strategies, production contexts, audience reception, and the broader cultural impact of telenovelas on fashion, language, and social norms. By situating these media productions within wider discussions of pop culture and social change, the course invites students to consider how mass entertainment both reflects and transforms everyday life throughout Latin America. Class sessions include clips, presentations, guided discussions, and oral assignments; outside of class, students complete readings, conduct research, watch telenovelas, and engage in written assignments. By the end of the course, students will be able to identify and evaluate narrative strategies, production contexts, and audience reception dynamics within the telenovela genre; discuss critically how telenovelas influence public discourse on class, race, gender, family, and national identity, and engage eCectively in oral and written assignments that integrate analytical, intercultural, and research-based perspectives. 

Prerequisite: Undergraduate Students in Spanish or heritage speakers. Classes conducted in Spanish (mostly) and English.

SPAN 462: 20th Century Spanish-American Studies

"Mediating the Present: A Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema that Knows, Witnesses, Desires"

Instructor: Santiago Rozo-Sanchez

TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm

What does cinema do when it thinks from within the conditions it seeks to understand? This course approaches 21st-century Latin American cinema as a practice of mediation: not a mirror held up to society but a formal, sensory, and political working-through of the contradictions that structure the region's present. Films do not stand outside the realities they engage; they participate in them, giving concrete shape to relations that are otherwise imperceptible. That participation is where both their power and their complicities reside.

The course begins by examining the material conditions under which contemporary Latin American cinema mediates: the economies of film festivals, the expansion of streaming platforms, the fragility of state funding, and the politics of transnational co-production. Who gets to mediate which stories, for whom, and under what constraints? From there, the course develops three analytical operations that students carry throughout the semester. Knows: cinema as a form of critical thinking conducted through images and sounds, exploring how filmmakers like Lucrecia Martel and Carlos Reygadas generate knowledge that other discursive forms cannot. Witnesses: cinema's capacity to make present what has been erased or denied, while interrogating the limits of testimonial mediation, as in the work of Tatiana Huezo, whose films testify to violence precisely through what they withhold. Desires: cinema as a site where longing, drive, and appetite become visible as political forces, explored through the work of Albertina Carri, whose films trace how desire for recovery, for insurgency, for the body, and for cinema itself is always shaped by the structures that produce and constrain it. These three modes are not sequential units but recurring lenses, brought into friction with one another across the semester. The most compelling films and the most productive disagreements emerge where the boundaries between knowing, witnessing, and desiring become unstable

SPAN 540: Colloquium in Hispanic Studies

"Don Quijote"

Instructor: Robert Bayliss

MW 9:00am - 10:15am

TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm

Why is Don Quijote, according to several accounts, the second-most read book in the world (after the Bible)? How can it be used so often today as an analogy to explain our current circumstances? This course will entail both a detailed study of Cervantes’s masterpiece (and the extensive body of criticism that it has generated) and an exploration of the “afterlife” of Don Quijote in Spain, Latin America and beyond. After studying the novel and the major issues that have been treated in Quijote scholarship, we will study a number of adaptations in print, on stage and on screen. Apart from shorter written assignments given as homework, students will write two longer papers: one textual analysis of Don Quijote due at midsemester (4–7 pages) and a final research paper (12–15 pages).

Prerequisites: SPAN 324, SPAN 340, SPAN 424, and two 400-level Hispanic literature courses.

SPAN 780: Intro to Hispanic Studies

"Ethics and the Analysis of Suffering"

Instructor: Patricia Manning

TuTh 02:30 PM - 03:45 PM

What are our ethical obligations as scholars when we study documents that have been produced under duress? How do we assess the reliability of confessions made during torture or under the threat of it? How do fictional characters manage these dilemmas? How does detective fiction handle interrogations? What are the implications of these choices? 

These are the questions that the course will explore.

Reading will include:

• Theoretical texts
• Inquisition records
• Fiction about the Inquisition
• Detective fiction
• Documents from Latin American dictatorships (Dirty War, Operation Condor, Pinochet)

The course satisfies one of the research skills and responsible scholarship requirements for the Ph.D., but all graduate students are welcome.

SPAN 801: Teaching Spanish in Institutions of Higher Learning

Instructor: Amy Rossomondo

M 4:00pm - 6:30pm

Required of all teaching assistants who teach beginning Spanish at the University of Kansas for the first time. Instruction in classroom procedures for first year Spanish, demonstration of teaching techniques, and survey of current methodology.
 

Course overview from syllabus:
We require incoming Spanish instructors to take SPAN 801 so that they will understand how we teach here at KU, and why we teach this way.  

The first part of the course is intended as a general overview of communicative, task-based language instruction and an introduction to processing instruction and how it can be applied the   Spanish courses that you are teaching. This overview will consist of exploring proven teaching methods and practices, as well as the theory and research that inform them. We will also dedicate portions of our class meetings to discussing and preparing for the course that you are teaching and other topics that are immediately applicable to your experience as an instructor in our program for the first time.

In the second part of the course we will turn our attention toward foreign language instruction beyond the introductory level. We will explore content-based instruction in a variety of manifestations, curricular design and measurement, critical pedagogies, the role of Open Educational Resources (OER) and technology in foreign language (FL) instruction, online instruction, as well as the relationship between language and culture and form and meaning from a pedagogical perspective.  

The final part of the course will be dedicated to applying this learning to the realization of an in-depth pedagogical project.  
SPAN 801 is also an opportunity for you to work closely with your fellow instructors and with me. The approach, assignments and projects for the seminar are designed to foster collaboration and reflection, both hallmarks of effective teaching and scholarship. We utilize the tools available in Canvas to facilitate this collaboration so that you gain hands-on experience with the available technology at KU; after this experience you should feel comfortable employing these tools in your own classes.

SPAN 940: Seminar in Transatlantic Literature and Culture

Policing Civilization in the Colonial Hispanic World

Instructor: Ninel Valderrama Negrón

T 4:00pm - 6:30pm

How do people learn to see “order” and “civilization”? Could order be recognize it in the rigid lines of a map? Or is it constructed through social practices and everyday interactions?

This seminar asks how social order was imagined, administered, and made visible in the Hispanic world through the concept of policía, understood not in its narrow modern sense, but as a broad civilizational logic that organized urban life, morality, hierarchy, and rule. Reading colonial texts and visual culture from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, students will examine how concepts such as conquest, colony, and pacification shaped the languages of domination. Particular attention will be given to the frontier, not simply as a territorial edge, but as a volatile zone of encounter where the categories of savagery and civilization were produced in relation to one another. Bringing together history, literary criticism, and visual studies, the seminar asks how texts, images, and archival forms taught subjects to see power as order. Working closely with original colonial sources, including period and manuscript editions, students will engage the rhetorical and material density of the archive while developing new tools for thinking about the afterlives of colonial governance.
 

PORT 611: Accelerated Basic Portuguese for Spanish Speakers I

Instructor: Ana Laura Marques

MW 2:00pm - 3:15pm

Contrastive phonological and morphological analysis of standard Spanish and the major dialect of Brazilian Portuguese, followed by a presentation of major grammatical and phonological stumbling blocks for Spanish speakers. Drills on grammar, syntax, and pronunciation emphasize those areas in which Brazilian Portuguese differs most significantly from Spanish. 

Prerequisite: Graduate student status in Spanish. Undergraduates in Spanish may be admitted with consent of instructor.

SPAN 325: Spanish for Heritage Speakers

Dr. Araceli Masterson-Algar

TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm

View on Schedule of Classes for Spring 2026

SPAN 325 is an intensive writing course designed specifically for students who are heritage speakers of Spanish. Students will further develop their academic writing and gramatical proficiency while engaging with the richness of Latinx histories of the United States in general, and in Kansas in particular. The course requires that students analyze and critically engage with a variety of texts of diverse format and origin to engage in the inmediacy of U.S. Latinx histories. In addition, we will be proactively addressing how literacy, visual and textual, can serve to unveil, revisit, and reflect upon the stories and memories of our communities.

Course intended for heritage speakers of Spanish and fulfills the same requirement as SPAN 324. Concurrent enrollment in SPAN 328 is strongly recommended.

SPAN 326: Spanish for Health Care Workers

Dr. Megan Sheldon

TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am

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This course is designed to provide students with the linguistic and cultural competencies necessary to communicate with and help treat Spanish speaking patients with limited English proficiency. Includes a general review of pertinent grammar, specific vocabulary groups relating to assessment and care of patients, vocabulary to establish rapport, and discussions leading to cultural competencies. Students who have completed SPAN 424 or above may take the course with the permission of the instructor. 

Prerequisite: Completion of SPAN 216 with a grade of C or better.

SPAN 448: Spanish Language and Culture for Business 

Dr. Miguel Ángel Albújar Escuredo

MW 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM

View on Schedule of Classes for Spring 2026

This course takes a cultural studies approach to contemporary Spanish and Latin American societies for students with an interest in business. It explores how individuals from Spanish-speaking communities navigate their use of Spanish in a business context. Readings include selections from literature, history, journalism, social analysis, and popular culture. Writing assignments focus on the context of business. Exercises help non-native speakers develop analytical skills as well as vocabulary and communication skills related to international business and professional life. Conducted in Spanish. Prerequisite: SPAN 323, or SPAN 324 and SPAN 328, or SPAN 325, or consent of instructor. A grade of B- or higher in SPAN 323, 324 or 325 is strongly recommended for students enrolling in this course. This course fulfills the same degree requirements for the Spanish major and minor as SPAN 424.

SPAN 450: Medieval Spanish Studies

Dr. Isidro Rivera

TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am

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View on Schedule of Classes for Spring 2026

This course will focus on the literary and cultural production of the court of Alfonso X, el Sabio (1221- 1284). The course will consider how Alfonso X fostered interactions among Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Iberian peninsula during the thirteenth century. It will examine this interaction through the literature, music, art, legal documents, and other cultural objects produced by Alfonso and his court in order to understand the richness and complexity of multicultural medieval Iberia.

Readings and other course resources will help students to explore Alfonso’s role as promoter of cultural and literary activity. This class will provide students with the opportunity to enrich their critical understanding of the cultural dynamics of medieval Iberia and to develop critical skills for analyzing medieval literary texts within the context of cultural interactions.

This course may be used to fulfill the 400-level peninsular Spanish literature requirement for the Minor or Major. Prerequisite: SPAN 340; recommended: SPAN 424.

Reading list:

• Alfonso X, Cantigas
• Alfonso X, Siete Partidas
• Alfonso X, Libro de los juegos
• Alfonso X, Estoria de España
• Anon., Auto de los Reyes Magos
• Anon., Sendebar
• Doubleday, The Wise King

For more information about the course, contact Prof. Rivera at ijrivera@ku.edu.

SPAN 464: Reading and Analysis of U.S. Latino/a Literatures

"Voces estadounidenses"

Dr. Sean Gullickson

MW 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM

View on Schedule of Classes for Spring 2026

The United States is the second-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, and approximately 20% of the population – 68 million people – identify as Latine. The experiences and cultural production of this group are crucial to our understanding of the Spanish-speaking world writ large as well as to our development as citizens of Kansas, the US and the world. 

This course will explore representations of the Latine experience in the United States through a variety of texts and media, from short stories to film, graphic novels to visual art, music to independent journalism. Our primary focus will be contemporary rather than historical. Covering topics like belonging, migration narratives, pop culture, Spanglish, and politics, we will seek to center the range of Latine voices that have shaped and continue to shape the cultural and social realities of the US and the world.

SPAN 522: Advanced Studies in Spanish Language

Dr. Amy Rossomondo

TuTh 01:00 PM - 02:15 PM

View on Schedule of Classes for Spring 2026

This course provides a general overview of topics in Hispanic Linguistics. We will explore the evolution and manifestations of the Spanish language with a focus on language variation. We will examine phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic phenomena in order to develop a more complete understanding of Spanish as a world language and the nature and properties of human language, in general. The course will culminate in the realization of a linguistic analysis project that demonstrates understanding of the concepts explored throughout the semester.

SPAN 540: Colloquium on Hispanic Studies

"Imagining Futures: Latin American SF"

Dr. Miguel Ángel Albújar Escuredo

MW 9:00am - 10:15am

View Course Flyer (.pdf)

View on Schedule of Classes for Spring 2026

This course is taught in Spanish. It explores the rich and diverse landscape of Latin American science fiction, a genre that blends speculative imagination with incisive sociopolitical critique. From dystopian visions to futuristic utopias, Latin American SF offers a unique lens through which to examine issues of identity, technology, colonialism, and resistance.

Students will engage with a variety of texts—short stories, novels, films, and graphic narratives—that reflect the region’s historical and cultural complexities. Through close readings and class discussions, we will analyze how Latin American authors use science fiction to challenge dominant narratives and envision alternative futures.

Course activities will include analytical essays, creative writing exercises, and a final project in which students will craft their own science fiction story inspired by the themes and styles studied throughout the semester.

At the conclusion of this course, students will be able to:

• Discover the unique themes and styles that characterize Latin American SF.
• Understand sociopolitical commentary embedded within Latin American SF.
• Engage in thought-provoking discussions with their peers regarding Latin American SF topics.
• Create a science fiction story inspired by the works previously covered in our classes.

Tentative Reading List:

• Angélica Gorodischer, selected stories
• Jorge Luis Borges, selected stories
• Luis Carlos Barragán, selected stories
• Hombre Mirando a Sudeste (movie)
• Mort Cinder (Comic book)
• Select critical essays on Latin American SF

Prerequisite: SPAN 424 and six hours of 400-level Spanish literature courses.

For more information about the course, contact Prof. Albujar Escuredo at malbujarescuredo2@gmail.com

SPAN 722: Special Topics in Spanish Literature (#54822)

"Metropolitan Canons and Transatlantic Intertextualities"

Dr. Robert Bayliss

Wednesdays, 4:30pm - 7:00pm

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View on Schedule of Classes for Spring 2026

This course addresses the cultural influence of Spain and its cultural institutions in the broader Spanish-speaking world, with an emphasis on Latin America and its participating institutions. An examination of the metacritical scholarship on the history and state of our field will inform our studies of the Spanish literary canon, especially in terms of how cultural communities throughout the Spanish-speaking world engage with it. We will read a series of canonical texts from the so-called Spanish Golden Age to better understand how they were generated, how they became treated as canonical, and in what ways they remain engaged in contemporary Spain and Latin America as objects of cultural consumption, as tools of colonial, postcolonial and neo-colonial institutions, and as sites for negotiating both hegemonic and counterhegemonic identities. All students will be encouraged to develop final projects that connect with their own research interests, in the hope that the course will inform their developing understanding of how their intellectual work can be situated in our developing and increasingly interconnected fields of study.

SPAN 785: Special Topics in Spanish-American Literature (#53161)

"The Novel Form: Politics, Aesthetics & Reading Colombian Literature in the Age of Immediacy"

Dr. Santiago Rozo-Sánchez

Mondays, 4:30pm - 7:30pm

View on Schedule of Classes for Spring 2026

In an age ruled by the instantaneous—of feeds, testimonies, and algorithmic self-exposure—the slow, dialectical labor of form appears both politically suspect and economically obsolete. And yet, if capital’s fantasy is immediacy, perhaps the novel remains the last defense of thinking as delay. What remains of the novel form when narration competes with notification, and when form itself is devalued by the affective accelerations of capital? This course reads the novel as both aesthetic totality and political technology; and wagers that the novel form, far from dead, endures as the medium through which politics and aesthetics continue to recognize one another. 

We will think and explore how to read and think with novels inspired by the work of Anna Kornbluh, Raymond Williams, Sianne Ngai, Nicholas Brown, Georg Lukács, Ángel Rama, Sergio Chejfec, Beatriz Sarlo, and Josefina Ludmer. Interrogating the novel’s formal and historical predicates—its capacity to totalize, to estrange, to think the social when sociality itself is fractured by spectacle. And we will ground our exploration in corpus of 21st century Colombian novels by Juan Cárdenas, Giussepe Caputo, Fátima Vélez, Laura Ortiz Gómez, Eliana Hernández, Andrea Salgado, and Evelio Rosero. Testing these questions on the soil of a national literature where political violence, ecological ruin, and neoliberal intimacy shape the conditions of posisilbities of literary experimentation.

SPAN 922: Seminar in Spanish Literature & Culture (#54820) 

"Poetas, cantaores y cantautores"

Dr. Jonathan Mayhew

Tuesdays, 4:30pm - 7:00pm

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Una aproximación a Federico García Lorca, Miguel Hernández, y otros poetes españoles desde la perspectiva del nuevo flamenco y la canciónde autor, desde los años 60 hasta la actualidad. Utilizando conceptos de la musicología cultural, estudiaremos los procesos de creación que convierten la poesía culta en canción popular, en la obra de músicos como Camarón de la Isla, Enrique Morente, Joan Manuel Serrat, Paco Ibáñez, Amancio Prada, Carmen Linares o Miguel Poveda. El resultado es una popularización de ciertos autores canónicos, pero asimismo una transformación literaria de géneros musicales.    

Hay grandes posibilidades de hacer proyectos originales, ya que este tema no ha sido objeto de mucha investigación académica.

PORT 612: Accelerated Basic Portuguese for Spanish Speakers II

Dr. Ana Laura Marques

MW 2:00pm - 3:15pm

View on Schedule of Classes for Spring 2026

PORT612 is an intermediate-high to advanced language course designed for Spanish speakers aiming to develop proficiency in Brazilian Portuguese. Through a contrastive analysis of phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary, students will explore the key linguistic differences and similarities between Spanish and Portuguese. The course emphasizes practical language use, including a range of academic genres in Portuguese through oral and written assignments. In addition to linguistic development, students will engage with intercultural topics from the Lusophone world. The course also encourages students to consider academic research in Portuguese-language studies, including linguistics, sociolinguistics, and Brazilian cultural studies. By the end of the course, students will be able to analyze linguistic connections, communicate effectively in Portuguese, and express informed perspectives on intercultural issues.

Prerequisite: PORT611, Graduate student status in Spanish. Undergraduates in Spanish may be admitted with consent of instructor. Classes conducted in Portuguese.