The Faculty of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese is committed to excellence in teaching and mentoring, along with the production of new knowledge that is the hallmark of a strong department. We are known for our focus on intersections between language, literature, culture, and politics, our community engagement, and our MA track in Hispanic Applied Linguistics. We bridge several intellectual fields across Spain and Spanish America and between North, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and Brazil, as we rethink the specificity of our cultures. The Department has been the home of major Latin American and Spanish literary figures, to include Juan Ramon Jimenez, who taught at the University between 1943 and 1951 and who, after being nominated by the Department, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956. His legacy, as well as that of cultural critic Angel Rama, award-winning poet Jose Emilio Pacheco, award winning writer and Professor Emeritus, Jorge Aguilar Mora, and Professor Emerita, Graciela Palau de Nemes, among others, continues to shape our thought, vision, and mission.
The Department is renowned for its multidisciplinary strengths in Latin American and Lusophone literatures and cultures as well as its faculty research in the areas of the history of ideas, Southern Cone literature, Judeo-Latin American literature, Mexican literature, theater, and performance, Latin American modernismo, colonial and transatlantic discourses, Central American transnational cultures, U.S. Latinidades, Quechua language and indigenous literatures, Caribbean-Archipelagic poetics/politics, salsa and sabor, Brazilian cinema, Lusophone Africa and African diaspora studies, deconstruction of the Cuban Revolution, and contemporary reinscriptions of the nineteenth century. Faculty members in the area of Spanish literature are recognized for their work in the history of the Spanish language and philology from the Middle Ages to the present, Medieval historiography and women narratives, Golden Age poetics, Cervantes and Quevedo traditions, revisions of the Enlightenment, romanticism (journalism and costumbrismo) and realism (philosophical traditions), modern and postmodern narrative and poetics, as well as representations of the Spanish Civil War and exile, particularly in Latin America.
