Undergraduate Spanish and Latin American Studies 2026-2027

The course introduces students to colonial encounters ranging from Muslim Iberia to the pre-conquest Americas and continuing into the period of the Spanish Empire.  From the nineteenth century, conquest and colonial encounters continued as newly-independent Spanish American states seized indigenous territories, while colonial mentalities re-surfaced in contexts as diverse as the Spanish Civil War and Southern Cone dirty wars. These examples show how colonial encounters helped shape contemporary Spain and Spanish America. 

The course will introduce students to several key texts from Spain. It will also introduce a key question in contemporary literary and film analysis: how texts may reinforce or challenge the social structures that underlie local and national communities.  To this end we will study plays, novels and films that have had a broad impact in the Spanish-speaking world and beyond, investigating how they work to cement the cultural values that bring communities together or, on the contrary, lead readers to question and rebel against prevailing social norms.

International agencies such as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime see organised crime as a growing challenge. International NGOs have emerged to address the challenge – an example is the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime. Yet national and international agencies disagree even on how to define organised crime, still more on how to respond to it. The course will consider how to understand organised crime, and will gauge efforts by state and society to respond to it.

The course will be analysing Gender Representations in 20^th Century Spanish Cinema and how these have been used to articulate critical portrayals of Spanish society. Students will study the ways in which these films relate to social and political developments such as the Civil War, Post-war, the Transition and Democracy.

International agencies such as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime see organised crime as a growing challenge. International NGOs have emerged to address the challenge – an example is the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime. Yet national and international agencies disagree even on how to define organised crime, still more on how to respond to it. The course will consider how to understand organised crime, and will gauge efforts by state and society to respond to it.

The course will be analysing Gender Representations in 20^th Century Spanish Cinema and how these have been used to articulate critical portrayals of Spanish society. Students will study the ways in which these films relate to social and political developments such as the Civil War, Post-war, the Transition and Democracy.