Taught at Reed

LIT/SPAN 351: Female Sinners and Saints in the Early Modern Transatlantic World

Targets, on the one hand, of criminalizing or pathologizing discourses that called for their exclusion from the public sphere, women were also key agents of hegemonic power in the Spanish colonial world. This course reflects on the generation of mutually conflicting female subjects in a context obsessed with the fight against religious and cultural otherness: the sinning body prone to sexual temptation and demonic possession and the saintly body, exemplary imitator of Christ’s suffering. Considering a varied corpus of Inquisition trials, spiritual autobiographies, wifely conduct manuals, mystical poetry, novellas, chronicles, paintings, and printed images from Spain and its American colonies, we think about the contradictions inherent in global Counter-Reformation gender politics and the myriad ways in which female writers and fictional personae co-opt or resist the stringent corporeal and mental discipline imposed on them. Students will, in addition, gain an understanding of the rich web of associations between religious confessional culture and emergent fictional genres. Authors studied include St. Teresa of Avila, Fray Luis de León, Christopher Columbus, Bartolomé de las Casas, María de Zayas, St. Rose of Lima, Sor María de Agreda, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. 

LIT/SPAN 344: Visual Art in Spanish Baroque Literature

This course studies the relationship between visual art and literature in early modern Spain. In an epoch in which the production of images has attained unprecedented cultural importance, literature redefines its aesthetic agenda, both modeling itself after and rivaling visual art. Considering various plays, poems, and novellas alongside relevant paintings, emblems, architectural works, and sculptures, we reflect upon how the interactions among these different art forms serve to mobilize audience emotion and comment on gender and class tensions. Also discussed are mounting anxieties about the role of art in a society marked by political crisis. In particular, we think about how the celebration of iconocentric culture is undercut by critical views of images as dangerous vehicles of moral and sexual depravity. Authors and artists studied include Teresa of Avila, Cervantes, Zayas, Calderón de la Barca, Guillén de Castro, Velázquez, Titian, El Greco, and Rubens.

SPAN 321: Theory and Practice of Hispanic Literature

This course is designed to give students a theoretical, historical, and cultural framework for the more advanced study of Spanish and Spanish American literature. It will include considerations of genre, reception, and critical theory. Students will be responsible for undertaking close readings of the texts as well as research projects.

HUM 211: Humanities 211

Beginning with the cultural and intellectual entanglements of the Christian and Islamic worlds in the Middle Ages, this course examines how Europeans’ understanding and experience of the world they inhabited were transformed between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Through readings of authors such as Ibn Tufayl, Averroës, Dante, Machiavelli, Diaz, Luther, Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, and Montaigne, we will explore how the momentous social, cultural, political, religious, philosophical, literary, and artistic developments of this period—encounters with non-Christians in the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds, the emergence of new genres in the literary and visual arts, and the social and religious upheaval of the Protestant Reformation—provoked a period of crisis and creativity that transformed the complex legacies of the ancient world. In particular, we will study how the reconfigured understandings of humanity’s relationship to nature, society, and the divine challenged assumptions about political, intellectual, religious, and gendered authority.

 

Taught at Hamilton College

Introduction to Latin American Literature

Study of representative writings, beginning with textual transcriptions of Amerindian myths and concluding with the twentieth-century short story.

Dissident Voices in Golden Age Spain

Analysis of a variety of genres (satirical prose, lyrical poetry, novella, religious writing), focusing on the debates surrounding the imposition of rigid models of civic virtue in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spanish culture.

Transatlantic Visions in the Hispanic World

Discussion of the political and cultural relationship between Spain and Spanish America from the fifteenth century to the present.

Taught at Columbia University

Latin American Humanities

Study of the literature and culture of Latin America from the Conquest to 1900 through the analysis of a variety of genres (chronicle, novel, political treatise, poem).  

Masterpieces of Western Literature and Philosophy

Discussion and analysis of major works ranging in time, theme, and genre from Homer to Virginia Woolf.

Picaresque Narratives (graduate course, Spanish & Comparative Literature)

Analysis of the satiric, parodic, and novelistic aspects of Picaresque fiction from its emergence in sixteenth-century Spain to later stages of its development in other national traditions.

The Poetics of Jorge Luis Borges (senior seminar)

Examination of his writing from the following perspectives: the concept of a “national” language, the end of epic, the definition of classical and avant-gardist poetics, the discussion of metaphor, and the practice of intertextuality.