Spain

This course analyzes anthropological contributions to the interpretation of cultural diversity in Spain. It offers a study of fundamental issues of Spanish culture and society in a historical and comparative context and critically evaluates the ethnological and socio-anthropological literature written about Spain and the Spanish. 

This course offers an overview of the foundations of contemporary theoretical-critical thinking and motivations behind the latest trends in literary theory. Topics include: feminist theory and literary criticism; from feminist theory to gender studies; the debate on reading.

This course offers an introduction to simulation, optimization, and machine learning techniques.

This course outlines the main developments of Hispano-American poetry in the twentieth century. It involves the reading and critical assessment of the work of many authors and themes: exhausted modernism and postmodernism (Dario, Lugones, Gonzalez Martinez, Agustini, Storni, Ibarbouru, Tabalda, and Lopez Velarde); introduction to two vanguardisms (Huidobro, Vallejo, Borges, Girondo, and Neruda); post-vanguardism (Borges, Lezama Lima, Paz, Molina, Rojas, and Varela); on the trails of Rubén Dario (Coronel Urtecho, Cuadra, Martinez Rivas, Cardenal, and Belli); anti-poetry (Parra); Octavio Paz and Nicanor Parra (critical poetry, visions from America, secret realism).

This course is divided into three parts and offers a comparative study of Spanish literature and its relationship with performing arts, film, and painting. Each of the three parts compares Spanish literature to another art form over the course of several centuries and various art movements or styles.

This course examines cultural, literary, and social histories of urban space in Madrid in order to question how the city contributes to shaping identities—cross-cut by gender, sexuality, social class, ethnicity, citizenship, etc.—and in turn, how the urban milieu is negotiated by them. The course takes the contemporary city of Madrid as its point of departure, in comparison with Paris, New York, London, the suburbs, etc., and examines case studies that address the entanglements among urban spaces, politics, and identities from modern and contemporary history. The material is organized into four thematic units: I. (Dis-)Identifying with Identities: identity politics & communities of difference today; spatial identities & non-places; identity politics in recent social movements; Spanish Nationalism and its transgressions in the 20th century. II. Questioning the Public and Private: gender in 19th century society and the home; masculinity, femininity, and homosexual cultural codes in the early 20th century public; reclaiming public space after dictatorship; camera surveillance in the democratic era. III. Desirable Cities, Desiring Cities: consumer desire and the origins of advertising; the surrealist and situationist critiques of urban life; urban decay, revival, and neighborhood struggles against gentrification in defense of the ‘right to the city.' IV. Sensing the City: Memory, Affect, and the Unseen: cultural heritage and historical memory in the urban landscape; Fear, terrorism, security in the city and the suburbs; citizenship, consumerism, and its ‘others'; digital dystopias.

This course studies the fundamental concepts and basic distinctions in the philosophy of language. It examines contemporary discussions related to the relationship between language and the world. It discusses the works of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Saul Kripke.