Spring 2027 Graduate Courses

SPAN 5140/SPAN 7140: Medieval Modernities and Postmodernities: Don Quijote and the Afterlives of Chivalry
Dr. Núria Silleras-Fernández, Tuesdays 3:30-6:05pm in McKenna 103

What happens when medieval ideals of chivalry encounter the realities of the early modern world? This course explores Miguel de Cervantes’s El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha as a work situated at the crossroads of two eras: deeply indebted to medieval literary traditions while simultaneously questioning, parodying, and transforming them to produce what has often been called the first modern novel, and to open the door to forms of fiction we now associate with postmodernism. 

More than four centuries after its publication, Don Quijote remains one of the most widely translated and influential works of world literature. Generations of writers and thinkers have discovered different, sometimes contradictory, Quijotes. In 1752, Charlotte Lennox reimagined Cervantes’s protagonist in The Female Quixote; Fyodor Dostoevsky considered Don Quijote one of the most splendid and saddest books ever written, while Gustave Flaubert recognized Cervantes as a literary ancestor. Franz Kafka reconsidered the relationship between Don Quijote and Sancho Panza, while W. H. Auden saw it as a portrait of the Christian saint. Jorge Luis Borges reinvented its meaning in “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,” while Vladimir Nabokov admired its protagonist but was deeply troubled by the cruelty on display in the novel. And the afterlives of Don Quijote continue today: Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear (2026), a dark satire about a tradwife influencer trapped in the nineteenth-century world she has idealized, can be read as a sort of Quixotic novel.

At the heart of this course lies a paradox: Cervantes seems to announce the death of chivalry while granting his knight an extraordinary afterlife. So, does Don Quijote represent the end of the medieval chivalric tradition, or its transformation into something new? What was the medieval chivalric tradition about? Why does Don Quijote continue to shape our understanding of heroism? How does a medieval knight become a protagonist of literary modernity and eventually postmodernity?

Don Quijote is a book about reading and writing, a book about books, and about what books do to us. Taking this premise as our point of departure, we will read both parts of Cervantes’s novel (1605 and 1615), alongside selected medieval and early modern texts, literary criticism, and history. Together, these readings will allow us to explore the enduring relationship between literature and history, fiction and reality, and the medieval past and its many modern and postmodern reinventions.

SPAN 5320/7320: Spanish American Literature, 20th and/or 21st Centuries
Dr. John Kennedy Godoy, Thursdays 3:35 - 6:05pm in McKenna 103
This course will examine how Latinx and Afro-Latinx fiction narrates undocumentation, race, queerness, and border environments in the United States. Beginning with the Mexican Revolution and concluding with contemporary Latinx writing, the course will look at formalist innovation, translation, bilingualism, translanguaging, heteroglossia (Bakhtin), narratology, and figural conceptions (Auerbach). We will examine how these and other tools help produce fictive worlds with the above themes.

Our focus will be on Chicanx, Caribbean, and Central American–American authors like Américo Paredes, Rolando Hinojosa, Helena María Viramontes, Ana Castillo, and Francisco Goldman. Afro-Latinx writers include Mayra Santos-Febres and Jennifer Maritza McCauley. Queer writers include John Rechy, Justin Torres, Carmen Maria Machado, and Manuel Muñoz. We will also read poets like Juan Felipe Herrera and Gloria Anzaldúa.
Some fiction will be read in Spanish and available in English where Spanish was the original language of publication, even though this course focuses only on U.S. Latinx writers, who write in Spanish as well.
Historiographic, theoretical, and critical work will include selections from Mae Ngai, Kelly Lytle Hernández, Monica Muñoz Martinez, Erich Auerbach, Jean-François Lyotard, Édouard Glissant, Hortense Spillers, José Esteban Muñoz, Ramón Saldívar, Lorgia García Peña, Glenda Carpio, and Yajaira Padilla.
Students will leave the course with advanced training in U.S. Latinx literature, historiography, literary theory, and border-related social science.
Selected Bibliography: Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (1987); Castillo, So Far from God (1993); Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman (1997); Hinojosa, Klail City y sus alrededores (1976); Machado, Her Body and Other Parties (2017); McCauley, When Trying to Return Home (2023); Muñoz, The Consequences (2022); Paredes, George Washington Gómez (1990); Rechy, City of Night (1963); Santos-Febres, Sirena Selena vestida de pena (2000); Torres, Blackouts (2023); Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus (1995).

SPAN 5430/7430: Hispanic Linguistics: Applications of Variationist Theory and Methods
Dr. Esther Brown, TTh 2:00 - 3:15pm in McKenna 103
This course is designed to provide a hands-on, skill building experience through a detailed study of linguistic variation in Spanish data. Emphasis will be given to research methods used in the study of variation. We will make explicit the steps involved in the identification of variants and variables, the delimitation of research projects, data collection, data management, data coding, statistical analyses, and interpretations of results. We will examine theories that address synchronic variation, as well as explore implications and applications of the research project(s) to models of language contact, lexical representation, and second language acquisition.