Spring 2024 Spanish Course Descriptions

SPAN/FR/ITAL 196 – Totalitarianism, Writing and Cinema
On Campus, TR 2:00-3:15
Instructor: Dr. Tatjana Gajic
“Never Again is Now” is the slogan used during recent commemorations of the 85th anniversary of the 1938 Nazi pogroms against German Jews. The demands not to repeat the dark history of the fascist era rise against the background of the spread of far-right parties and ideologies throughout Europe, in the countries of the former Soviet Block (Hungary, Poland, Slovakia) as well as the established democracies like Sweden, Finland, France, Germany and Italy. Did attitudes towards fascism in our time cross the threshold from “Never Again” to “Now, Once Again”?
In this class we will approach that important and in many ways scary question with a sense of curiosity, courage, critical intelligence and desire to understand the past and its relationship to the present. We will ask ourselves: What were the fascist movements in 1930s and 1940s Germany, Italy and Spain and how did they come about? What was the relationship between politics, literature and art in the context of the rise of fascist movements? What are the similarities and divergence between the historical totalitarianisms and the growth of the far-right today?
This interdisciplinary class, in which we will work with a variety of sources (historical and political writings, literature, film, graphic novel), is suited for students interested in multiple fields, among them Spanish, Italian or German Cultural Studies, Film, English and Political Science.
Taught in English
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These courses meet on campus MWF. Asynchronous online work outside of class is required.

Days and times listed for these courses indicate required, on campus sessions. No online/remote attendance options are available.

SPAN 101 – Elementary Spanish I
MWF 8:00-8:50, 9:00-9:50, 10:00-10:50, 12:00-12:50, 1:00-1:50, & 2:00-2:50
Extensive computer use required. Field work required. Class is taught in Spanish, at a level appropriate for the course; the main purpose is communication. Course includes: regular in-classroom interactions, substantial reading and listening for homework, regular class presentations, and one exploratory visit to a Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago. One credit hour takes place online, plus homework. Prerequisite(s): Appropriate score on the department placement test. Classes are on campus.

SPAN 102 – Elementary Spanish II
MWF 8:00-8:50, 9:00-9:50, 10:00-10:50, 11:00-11:50, 12:00-12:50, 1:00-1:50, & 2:00-2:50
Extensive computer use required. Field work required. Class is taught in Spanish, at a level appropriate for the course; the main purpose is communication. Course includes: regular in-classroom interactions, substantial reading and listening for homework, regular class presentations, and one exploratory visit to a Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago. One credit hour takes place online, plus homework. Prerequisite(s): SPAN 101; or appropriate score on the department placement test. Classes are on campus.

SPAN 103 – Intermediate Spanish I
MWF 8:00-8:50, 10:00-10:50, 11:00-11:50, 12:00-12:50, 1:00-1:50, 2:00-2:50, & 3:00-3:50
Extensive computer use required. Field work required. Class is taught in Spanish, at a level appropriate for the course; the main purpose is communication. Course includes: regular in-classroom interactions, substantial reading and listening for homework, regular class presentations, and one exploratory visit to a Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago. One credit hour takes place online, plus homework. Prerequisite(s): SPAN 102; or appropriate score on the department placement test. Classes are on campus.

SPAN 104 – Intermediate Spanish II
MWF 8:00-8:50, 9:00-9:50, 10:00-10:50, 11:00-11:50, 12:00-12:50, 1:00-1:50, & 2:00-2:50
Extensive computer use required. Field work required. Class is taught in Spanish, at a level appropriate for the course; the main purpose is communication. Course includes: six 30-minute face-to-face interactions with native speakers of Spanish from Latin America and Spain via TalkAbroad; regular in-classroom interactions, substantial reading and listening for homework; regular class presentations; and one exploratory visit to a Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago. One credit hour takes place online, plus homework. Prerequisite(s): SPAN 103; or appropriate score on the department placement test. Classes are on campus.

SPAN 113 – Spanish for Bilinguals I
MWF 8:00-8:50, 9:00-9:50, 10:00-10:50, 11:00-11:50, 1:00-1:50, & 2:00-2:50

SPAN 114 – Spanish for Bilinguals II
MWF 8:00-8:50, 9:00-9:50, 10:00-10:50, 11:00-11:50, 12:00-12:50, 1:00-1:50, & 2:00-2:50

SPAN 202 – Spanish Grammar in Practice
On Campus, MW 9:30-10:45
Instructor: Dr. Shane Ebert

SPAN 202 – Spanish Grammar in Practice
On Campus, TR 11:00-12:15
Instructor: Dr. Shane Ebert

SPAN 202 – Spanish Grammar in Practice
On Campus, TR 2:00-3:15
Instructor: Dr. Kim Potowski

SPAN 203 – Extensive Reading and Writing for Non-Native Speakers of Spanish
Online Synchronous, TR 8:00-9:15
Instructor: Dr. Silvia Rosman

SPAN 204 – Extensive Reading and Writing for Heritage Speakers of Spanish
Online Synchronous, TR 11:00-12:15
Instructor: Dr. Silvia Rosman

SPAN 204 – Extensive Reading and Writing for Heritage Speakers of Spanish
On Campus, MWF 1:00-1:50
Instructor: Dr. David Rodriguez

SPAN 206 – Introduction to Hispanic Linguistics
On Campus, MW 9:30-10:45
Instructor: Dr. David Miller
Words–and the rules that bring them to life–are at the core of the human experience. Linguistic sounds (phonology and phonetics), structure (syntax), meaning (semantics), and context (pragmatics) help us understand why hit is as trivial as a word can be, but adding an s- to the front will get your mouth washed out with soap; how a lawyer can crack a cold case based on a criminal’s use of tense; how “mere semantics” can cost us billions of dollars; or how lying, as terrible as it can be, is as commonplace to our linguistic repertoire as any other of the games we play with language. SPAN 206 will be a lens through which we come to understand these and other language-related phenomena as a wonderful feat of human cognition and, therefore, the human experience.

SPAN 206 – Introduction to Hispanic Linguistics
On Campus, TR 11:00-12:15
Instructor: Lidia Aguilera Lora

SPAN 206 – Introduction to Hispanic Linguistics
On Campus, TR 12:30-1:45
Instructor: Dr. Luis López

SPAN 210 – Introduction to the Formal Analysis of Hispanic Texts
On Campus, TR 11:00-12:15
Instructor: Dr. Tatjana Gajic

SPAN 210 – Introduction to the Formal Analysis of Hispanic Texts
On Campus, TR 12:30-1:45
Instructor: Dr. Keith Budner

SPAN 210 – Introduction to the Formal Analysis of Hispanic Texts
On Campus, TR 2:00-3:15
Instructor: Dr. Margarita Saona

SPAN 212 – Cultural and Literary Studies in Spain and/or Latin America
On Campus, TR 12:30-1:45
Instructor: Dr. Gabriel Riera

SPAN 302 – Exploring Spanish Grammar
On Campus, TR 12:30-1:45
Instructor: Dr. Inma Taboada

SPAN 303 – Advanced Oral Presentation, Writing, and Analysis
Online Synchronous, TR 9:30-10:45
Instructor: Dr. Silvia Rosman

SPAN/LALS 304 – Introduction to Spanish Creative Writing for Heritage Speakers
On Campus, TR 3:30-4:45
Instructor: Dr. Margarita Saona

SPAN 320 – Spanish for Business and Law II
On Campus, MWF 11:00-11:50
Instructor: Stephanie Munoz-Navarro

SPAN 321 – Spanish for Health Personnel II
On Campus, MWF 12:00-12:50
Instructor: Dr. Diana Gonzalez-Cameron
If you are interested in becoming a nurse, a physical therapist, a pharmacist, a doctor, doctor’s assistant, a dentist, or any profession in which there will be an interaction with a patient/client and a health/medical professional, this is the courses for you! You will learn basic medical terminology, basic human anatomy, how to give instructions, how to decipher in plain language what the medical provider says so you can communicate it to the patient/client and so much more! Come and join us in the second of two stimulating courses.

SPAN 321 – Spanish for Health Personnel II
On Campus, MWF 1:00-1:50
Instructor: Dr. Diana Gonzalez-Cameron
If you are interested in becoming a nurse, a physical therapist, a pharmacist, a doctor, doctor’s assistant, a dentist, or any profession in which there will be an interaction with a patient/client and a health/medical professional, this is the courses for you! You will learn basic medical terminology, basic human anatomy, how to give instructions, how to decipher in plain language what the medical provider says so you can communicate it to the patient/client and so much more! Come and join us in the second of two stimulating courses.

SPAN 328 – Advanced Translation
On Campus, MW 3:00-4:15
Instructor: Dr. Dianna Niebylski

SPAN 361 – The Structure of Spanish
On Campus, MW 4:30-5:45
Instructor: Dr. Jose Camacho

SPAN 366 – Topics in Spanish Linguistics: Intercultural Pragmatics
On Campus, TR 11:00-12:15
Instructor: Dr. Luis López
Intercultural pragmatics is like the detective work of communication, especially when diverse cultures collide. Consider this scenario: Chris and Ali are out shopping. Chris holds up a skirt and asks Ali, “Do you think this would look good on me?”. Ali thinks that Chris would not look good, and may provide one of these two answers: (i) “No, it won’t”; (ii) “Why don’t you look at this other skirt?” In some cultures, answer (i) is acceptable; in others it is very rude. Those who find (i) acceptable, find (ii) evasive and insincere. In this course, we will examine the subtle and often unspoken rules that guide how people from different backgrounds express themselves, interpret meanings, and navigate social interactions.

SPAN 375 – Literatura y escuela en el siglo XX hispanoamericano
On Campus, TR 12:30-1:452:00-3:15
Instructor: Dr. Enrique Macari
En este curso haremos un recorrido por la literatura latinoamericana del siglo XX, enfocándonos en la relación entre obras literarias e instituciones educativas. Por una parte, investigaremos el lugar que la literatura y los escritores han ocupado dentro de los sistemas educativos de distintos países como México, Argentina, Uruguay y Perú. Por otra, analizaremos obras literarias que imaginan la experiencia escolar desde distintas perspectivas individuales y colectivas. A través de nuestro recorrido exploraremos cómo la escuela distribuye distintos tipos de conocimientos, habilidades y gustos, además de producir distintas formas de identidad cultural (nacionalidad, género, raza, clase).

SPAN 377 – Topics in Health, the Psyche, and the Human Body in Hispanic Culture
On Campus, TR 2:00-3:15
Instructor: Dr. Gabriel Riera

SPAN 380 – Professional Development
On Campus, W 2:00-2:50
Instructor: Dr. Inma Taboada

SPAN 406 – Spanish Sociolinguistics
On Campus, W 6:00-8:30
Instructor: Dr. Kim Potowski

SPAN 414 – Don Quijote
On Campus, T 9:30-12
Instructor: Dr. Keith Budner
Let’s journey into a world of feminist shepherdesses and cross-dressing priests, enchanted caves and trips to the moon, fortune-telling monkeys, devious wizards, trickster puppeteers, sadistic aristocrats, and messy love triangles. Not to mention, windmills that look like giants. Our guides on this journey are just as bizarre: an obsessive reader who thinks he’s a knight in shining armor and a farmer who may or may not get to rule his own island (no spoilers!).
Don Quijote is widely regarded as the first modern novel of European literature—but what exactly does that mean? In this course, we’ll interrogate each of these terms through a close reading of Miguel de Cervantes’s masterpiece. Is the novel’s modernity a question of literary form and style? Is it a statement about art’s relationship to our ‘Modern Age’ of social upheaval in politics and law, race and religion? What does it say that the first modern novel is about a man who imagines himself to be a knight in shining armor, a hero of a bygone era? With his modern novel, is Cervantes telling us that the heroism of myth and legend is a thing of the past, or that it never even existed in the first place—that it was always just the stuff of myth and legend? And how is it that this so-called “European” novel emerged at the margins of Europe, in a nation that uniquely felt—and with a novel whose characters uniquely represent—the medieval legacy of convivencia between Christians, Jews, and Muslims? Ours will be a journey through history and fiction, magic and the imagination.

SPAN / FR / GER 449 – Teaching Second Language Literacy and Cultural Awareness
On Campus, R 3:30-6
Instructor: Dr. Inma Taboada

SPAN 451 – Educational Practice with Seminar I
On Campus, W 4:00-5:50
Instructor: Dr. Inma Taboada

SPAN 494 – Modernist, Postmodern and Contemporary Short Stories in the Americas
On Campus, M 5:00-7:30
Instructor: Dr. Dianna Niebylski
These are some of the topics we plan to discuss in relation to the short stories assigned:
• The recurrence of myths and fables
• Gender and sexuality
• East-West cultural encounters
• Borders and Immigration- Then and Now
• Experimental approaches to short fiction
• The future of national literatures in an era of globalization
• The relationship between translation and transnationalism
Throughout the semester, we will consider different short story theories as we discuss the assigned stories and topics. Discussion will be in Spanish and English. Students are expected to read the stories in the original Spanish or in the original English, but most of the stories assigned are also available in translation.

SPAN 507 – Seminar in Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism
On Campus, R 2:00-4:30
Instructor: Dr. Liliana Sánchez
The course examines recent theoretical approaches to the question of how multiple languages are represented in the bilingual mind, especially in contexts of linguistic and social inequality. The first part of the course will provide an introduction to proposals based on the interaction between two lexicons in the bilingual mind (among bilinguals from birth and sequential bilinguals or second language acquirers). The second part of the course will present approaches that account for differential/innovative outcomes in bilingual representations as a result of the availability of multiple groupings of features from different language components (the lexicon, syntax, semantics and pragmatics) from each of the languages. The course will focus on the effects of language activation and differences in language experience on differential/innovative outcomes. Research that explores the consequences of this view for the acquisition of Spanish as a Heritage language in the US, and for the acquisition of bilingual varieties of Spanish in contact with Indigenous languages in Latin America will be discussed.

SPAN 510 – Advanced Spanish Phonology
On Campus, W 3:00-5:30
Instructor: Dr. Jennifer Cabrelli

SPAN 570 – Seminar in Literary Theory and Criticism: “El cine de Luis Buñuel”
On Campus, W 3:00-5:30
Instructor: Dr. Steven Marsh