Corpus linguistics studies language using real texts – especially large, machine-readable collections of texts – as its primary source of data. This course offers an introduction to the discipline focusing on its applications in the field of translation studies, where parallel corpora – consisting of matching pairs of original and translated texts – have had a prominent place in the last few decades.

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Blacks have been part of the Spanish-American colonial encounter from the outset, playing essential roles in the configuration of both societies and cultures of all Latin American peoples. Yet, their voices and agency have been concealed and distorted in the “literary” and textual expressions of the period. This course will examine the voices, agency, and identity construction of the African descendants that emerge from archival documents, legal treatises, chronicles religious literature, poetry, and visual documents. We will explore the racial politics of Church and State and the evolution of racial constraints at key moments of the colonial period. Part of the class will be devoted to the study of theoretical articles on the concept of race and issues of subjectivity, identity, and racial construction. This course will be taught in English; however, papers and written assignments can be written in Spanish or English.

At once a mass-marketed commodity, a spectacle full of scandal and suspense, and a puzzle calling for knowledge of social norms, crime, and detective fiction illuminates the shifting line between high and low art—and the contradictions of modern morality. In this course, students will analyze the structure of the detective story and assess the influence of historical events on this popular genre by focusing on crime fiction in the Hispanic world. Over the course of the class, we will also consider the contribution of Hispanic writers to the development of the genre, particularly the creation of the neopolicial and narcoliteratura, and the portrayal of violence and crime in Spanish-speaking countries.

Although “biopolitics” is a term most readily associated with European philosophers (Foucault, Agamben, Esposito), the theorization of power, politics, and resistance around life itself has a long and rich history in Latin America that departs in significant ways from continental philosophy. Horacio Legrás, for example, reclaims works such as Domingo F. Sarmiento's Facundo, José María Arguedas' El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo and Manuel Moreno Fraginals' 1964 study of the Cuban ingenio—published nearly at the same time that Foucault was delivering his Society Must be Defended lectures—as foundational texts that root biopower in a colonial matrix overlooked by European theory. Moving beyond descriptions of how nation-states and capitalist systems exercise power over biological life, we can also examine the many ways in which Latin American thinkers have “reconceptualized subjectivity around the interplay of body, life and power” (Giorgi), from the autopoietic theory of life developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in the 1970s to Clarice Lispector's concept of lo viviente, Sayak Valencia's capitalismo gore and the notions of life as autonomía and relationality with the more-than-human world that have emerged within contemporary Afro-descendant and Indigenous movements. In addition to examining Latin American critical contributions to the concepts of biopolitics, necropolitics, and life politics, this course will place these terms in conversation with visual, literary, and cinematic works that center race, sexuality, disability, and non-human life in their explorations of the "politics of flesh and land" (Rifkin). At a time when Black, Indigenous, queer, trans, feminist, and human rights movements across the region are increasingly conceiving dissidence as the enactment of políticas de la vida, we will interrogate what it means to conceptualize politics around life (and its counterpart: death), particularly the implications that this has for the form and content of cultural productions.

This course addresses expanded notions of how we communicate in the 21st century. Engaging in this global and diverse society requires that we create meaningful information through advanced technologies that encourage the inclusion of rhetorical choices that integrate writing, visual images, or technological applications, such as the integration of hyperlinks (Fordham & Oakes, 2013), within a global community comprised of unique cultures. Grounded in multiliteracies as a theoretical and pedagogical approach, this course focuses on how individuals develop literacies in a variety of modes (i.e., linguistic, visual, audio, spatial, and gestural) within a social context. More specifically, this course will show ways in which individuals access information and use any technological resource to communicate with others in multimodal forms, whether printed, audiovisual, or digital, providing the ideal spaces for engaging in (multi)cultural and (multi)linguistic ways; thus, raising awareness of voice, identity, agency, and multilingual and translanguaging practices. These communication modes (e.g., written, and oral) that are distributed via a distinct range of media will be examined from diverse research and pedagogical perspectives.

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This is a reading-intensive graduate seminar. We focus on issues pertaining to race, gender, and coloniality in Brazil and the Luso-Brazilian world. Emphasis is put on the regional literature of the Brazilian Northeast (Sertão). Beyond reading the foundational novels of Euclides da Cunha, Itamar Vieira Junior, Jorge Amado, Graciliano Ramos, Gilberto Freyre, and Rachel de Queiros, we analyze the movies of Glauber Rocha and other Brazilian moviemakers working in the decolonial tradition. Required readings also include selections from Historia da Expansão Portuguesa.

ON-LINE (synchronous Mondays and Wednesdays 10am – 12noon CST, other days asynchronous), for both MA and PhD students in Spanish Literature and Cultural Studies and Linguistics

 TTU Catalog Course Description: A course to introduce students to the field of Hispanism, to prepare students to write effectively, and to conduct independent research in the fields of Hispanic literature, linguistics, and culture. This course will be conducted primarily in Spanish.

Additional Course Description: This course will consist of a series of presentations, discussions, and critiques of sample materials as well as guest visits from early career faculty from other institutions talking about their transition from student to academic life, faculty from the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures, staff from the Texas Tech Library and the Graduate School. Sessions will deal with the demands and expectations of graduate study and major issues confronting higher education in the United States. The course will introduce students to the types of activities they will undertake as researchers and will familiarize them with current research methods, trends, and opportunities. We will examine how to undertake research, how to document that research properly, and how to present it in the form of an abstract, a written paper, a conference presentation, and a grant application. Students will be evaluated on the basis of attendance (10%), meaningful participation (10%), the successful completion of an abstract (20%), two bibliographical exercises (40%), and a critical response to a grant application (20%).

Course expectations: Each student will be expected to complete reading assignments, contribute to the Monday and Wednesday discussions, and turn in four written assignments (Abstract, Bibliography #1, Bibliography #2, Preliminary Grant Proposal). For MA students, the written assignments are meant to serve as opportunities to further develop papers in progress and other projects from the previous academic year. For PhD students, the course assignments can be tailored to further work on the PhD portfolio in consultation with the professor.

By the end of the course, you should have:

-- A general understanding of the profession of Hispanism and how to find your place in the profession
-- An awareness of the resources available for Hispanists
-- The rudiments of documentation and academic publication

This course is designed for students who intend to implement updated technology effectively in their classrooms to become more effective and engaging educators. Students will identify different technology tools that can be used in the language classroom by exploring the affordances of “conventional technology tools” (e.g., Padlet, Sirft) and up-to-date tools (e.g., ChatGPT).

Intensive introduction to the Portuguese language for graduate students proficient in Spanish. Supports the Portuguese minor for the Spanish M.A. and Ph.D. programs.

While we have technology that translates diverse languages, translation tools cannot always capture the complexities of a language such as tone, dialects, or the intended meaning in diverse cultures. We all know that speaking a heritage language (HL) and a second language (L2) entails more than learning vocabulary; it requires time and effort.

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In this course, we will examine the role of landscape and the natural world in shaping local identities, while exploring transnational, post-nationalist, and hemispheric approaches to understanding US Latinx/e cultural production as part of a global dialogue. We will assess the benefits and limits of geographically bound area studies frameworks by investigating geographic particularity while at the same time highlighting Chicana and Mexicana authors' historical continuity and ongoing dialogue with critical thought throughout Latin America. We will explore a range of theoretical frameworks for approaching this material, including ecocriticism, spatial theory, border theory, third space Chicana feminism, and transnational approaches. Objects of study in the course include poetry, photography, short stories, film, and novels.

In this course, we will examine the role of landscape and the natural world in shaping local identities, while exploring transnational, post-nationalist, and hemispheric approaches to understanding US Latinx/e cultural production as part of a global dialogue. We will assess the benefits and limits of geographically bound area studies frameworks by investigating geographic particularity while at the same time highlighting Chicana and Mexicana authors' historical continuity and ongoing dialogue with critical thought throughout Latin America. We will explore a range of theoretical frameworks for approaching this material, including ecocriticism, spatial theory, border theory, third space Chicana feminism, and transnational approaches. Objects of study in the course include poetry, photography, short stories, film, and novels.

Through recent scholarship in the humanities and social sciences that questions the concept of bodies as fixed, material entities subject to the empirical rules of biology (the theories of Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway and Susan Suleiman in particular), this course Embodying the Spanish Avant-Garde will look at the work of authors such as Benjamín Jarnés, Rosa Chacel, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Federico García Lorca, Carmen de Burgos and Francisco Ayala as well as filmmakers Benito Perojo, Nemesio Sobrevila  and Luis Buñuel in order to explain the narrative depictions of these struggles between a rebellious male creator and a number of highly feminized artistic and social institutions.

Understanding the Heritage Speaker: Theoretical and Pedagogical Perspectives

This course has a twofold objective: 1) to understand the sociolinguistic and socio-affective needs of the heritage speaker, and how they are different from those of second language learners, and 2) to familiarize with the best teaching practices for heritage speakers in mixed classrooms as well as in the heritage language classroom.