Spring 2026 Graduate Courses
SPAN 5140/7140 Seminar: Spanish Literature, Medieval Period
When Virtue Goes Rogue: The Passions in Medieval and Early Modern Times
Tuesdays 3:30 – 6:00pm
Prof. Núria Silleras-Fernández
This seminar is designed for graduate and advanced undergraduate students with
differentiated workloads in each case. It examines the complex and often paradoxical tensions
between good and bad behavior, virtue and transgression, emotion and reason, health and
sickness, and acceptability and deviance, as represented in late medieval and early modern
Iberian culture and literature. While certain writers envisioned an “ideal society” marked by rigid
hierarchies, binary notions of gender, and religious difference between Jews, Christians,
Muslims, and converts as the principal marker of prejudice, many others revealed a different
social reality characterized by fluidity, gender performativity, cultural permeability, and
sustained interaction between majority and minority communities. We will explore how literary
texts both reinforced and challenged hegemonic discourses, participating in the continual
negotiation of power, morality, and identity. Special attention will be given to how these texts
were later reinterpreted to align with shifting emotional regimes. Our discussions on what was
conceived as good and bad behavior, and in what contexts, will engage canonical and non-canonical works alike, situating them within contemporary debates in Iberian, Mediterranean,
and Transatlantic studies. The course is taught in Spanish.
For more information, please contact Prof. Núria Silleras-Fernández at silleras@colorado.edu
Wednesdays 3:35 - 6:05pm
Prof. John Kennedy Godoy
This course will focus on contemporary Indigenous cinema and poetry in and of Abya Yala, the Kuna term often equivocally linked with the Americas. By contrast, this course will center Indigenous land, kinship, kinstallations, artistic practices, activism, and theory. Through the field of Critical Indigenous Studies, our focus will be on the porous boundaries of artistic production—particularly cinema, poetry, and epistemologies in Abya Yala—with a focus on the regions of Mexico, Central America, the Amazon, and the Andes. Concurrent to an interrogation of the visual ethnographic gaze seen since Eisenstein’s documentary on Oaxaca (1931) or Nanook of the North (1922) we will examine how Indigenous film makers not only resist the settler’s ethnographic gaze—in particular its essentialist grammars—but fragment its locus through and past the coetaneity of land, politics, and kinship. We will ask what are the formal cinematic techniques used by Indigenous film makers and how do they refract the territorialization implicit to the camera’s aperture and autonomous subject?
Interdisciplinary course texts will include, for example, selections from Frames of Resistance: The Cinemas of Abya Yala (2025); Indian Given: Racial Geographies Across Mexico and the United States (2016); and Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (2015); Acoustic Colonialism: Acts of Mapuche Interference (2025); and This Mouth is Mine (2024).
Documentary, experimental, and narrative film viewings will include work from canonical film makers like Alberto Muenala (Kichwa) and emergent film makers like Tirza Ixmucané (Kiche) and Leiqui Urianaamong (Wayuu, Sijono), among others. We will focus on both feature-length and short form film. Poetry books will include work by Irma Pineda (Binnizá), Humberto Ak’abal (K’iche), and others, and will complement film choices. Guest speakers, including translators, scholars, poets, and film makers, will join the class remotely. Course will be in Spanish and English with an emphasis given to originary languages.
Tuesday/Thursday 2:00 - 3:15pm
Prof. Esther Brown
Many well-understood linguistic, extralinguistic and/or discourse~pragmatic factors shape variant realizations of sounds, words and constructions in target production contexts. These phonetic and morphosyntactic variants of words and/or constructions, arising in production contexts, become registered in memory as lexically specific variants. Thus, contexts of use affect linguistic productions and such productions, in turn, are stored as lexical representations. Nevertheless, words and constructions differ significantly with regard to their exposure to conditioning factors of the production context. That is, opportunity biases arise naturally in discourse whereby some words co-occur with specific conditioning factors significantly more than other words do, giving rise to patterns of synchronic variation and diachronic change indicative of words’ accumulation in memory of contextual conditioning effects. In this course, we will closely examine implications of these probabilistic patterns of use. We will consider different examples of conditioning factors, types of conditioning contexts, and research that explores correlations between contextual conditioning effects and variant forms of words. The course will review theories that attempt to account for the patterns of phonological variation, propose methods for testing the effect of contextual conditioning, and explore potential applications to acquisition and bilingual data. 鶹Ժ will work to identify and test novel applications of lexically specific contextualized conditioning.