PORT 7510a / BLST 7681a / CPLT 7510a / ER&M 6524, The Portuguese Black Atlantic (1420s–2020s): History, Literature, Film  Staff

The Atlantic turn in history and cultural studies often unwittingly reproduced imperial history, studying the impact of European power and forms of knowledge on the Americas. Even postcolonial approaches such as Paul Gilroy’s in The Black Atlantic displayed an implicit Anglophone bias that entirely overlooked historical processes occurring elsewhere in the South Atlantic. On the other hand, scholarly inquiries that focus on Latin America cannot fully account for the specificities that are associated with what we call the Portuguese Black Atlantic, as they still consider 1492 as the watershed moment for Atlantic history. In this seminar we study the emergence of what was known for centuries as the “Ethiopic Ocean,” an imaginary space where important polities, diasporic formations, and cultural creation and confrontations took place around the Portuguese language, beginning in the fifteenth century. We examine a range of materials from early modern Portuguese chronicles, Jesuit sermons, proto-abolitionist dialogues, prose fiction, poetry, journalism, and film, among other textual sources. We also foreground the emergence of Black literary authorship in Brazil, Portugal, and Lusophone Africa within a wider cultural process that we can call Portuguese Black modernity between the 1920s and the 1960s. Conducted in English, but reading knowledge of Portuguese required.
W 4pm-5:55pm

PORT 9220a, Brazil’s Cannibal Modernism: From Modern Art Week to Antropofagia  Kenneth David Jackson

A study of Brazilian modernism in literature and the arts, centered on São Paulo’s Modern Art Week of 1922 and the Cannibal Manifesto from the perspective of major figures and works, and transatlantic exchanges with figures from the European avant-gardes. Includes analysis of Antropofagia as a postcolonial strategy.
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm

PORT 9600a, World Cities and Narratives  Kenneth David Jackson

Study of world cities and narratives that describe, belong to, or represent them. Topics range from the rise of the urban novel in European capitals to the postcolonial fictional worlds of major Portuguese, Brazilian, and Spanish American cities. Conducted in English.
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

SPAN 5000b / FREN 6700b / ITAL 6570b / LING 5640b, Principles of Language Teaching and Learning  Staff

Introduction to the basic principles of second-language acquisition theory, focusing on current perspectives from applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. Topics include language teaching methodology, communicative and task-based approaches, learner variables, intercultural competence, and models of assessment.
HTBA

SPAN 6205a / CPLT 9004a / FILM 6170a / FREN 875 / FREN 8750a / GMAN 6004a, Psychoanalysis: Key Conceptual Differences between Freud and Lacan I  Moira Fradinger

This is the first section of a year-long seminar (second section: CPLT 914) designed to introduce the discipline of psychoanalysis through primary sources, mainly from the Freudian and Lacanian corpuses but including late twentieth-century commentators and contemporary interdisciplinary conversations. We rigorously examine key psychoanalytic concepts that students have heard about but never had the chance to study. Students gain proficiency in what has been called “the language of psychoanalysis,” as well as tools for critical practice in disciplines such as literary criticism, political theory, film studies, gender studies, theory of ideology, psychology medical humanities, etc. We study concepts such as the unconscious, identification, the drive, repetition, the imaginary, fantasy, the symbolic, the real, and jouissance. A central goal of the seminar is to disambiguate Freud's corpus from Lacan's reinvention of it. We do not come to the “rescue” of Freud. We revisit essays that are relevant for contemporary conversations within the international psychoanalytic community. We include only a handful of materials from the Anglophone schools of psychoanalysis developed in England and the US. This section pays special attention to Freud's “three” (the ego, superego, and id) in comparison to Lacan's “three” (the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real). CPLT 914 devotes, depending on the interests expressed by the group, the last six weeks to special psychoanalytic topics such as sexuation, perversion, psychosis, anti-asylum movements, conversations between psychoanalysis and neurosciences and artificial intelligence, the current pharmacological model of mental health, and/or to specific uses of psychoanalysis in disciplines such as film theory, political philosophy, and the critique of ideology. Apart from Freud and Lacan, we will read work by Georges Canguilhem, Roman Jakobson, Victor Tausk, Émile Benveniste, Valentin Volosinov, Guy Le Gaufey, Jean Laplanche, Étienne Balibar, Roberto Esposito, Wilfred Bion, Félix Guattari, Markos Zafiropoulos, Franco Bifo Berardi, Barbara Cassin, Renata Salecl, Maurice Godelier, Alenka Zupančič, Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, Norbert Wiener, Alan Turing, Eric Kandel, and Lera Boroditsky among others. No previous knowledge of psychoanalysis is needed. Starting out from basic questions, we study how psychoanalysis, arguably, changed the way we think of human subjectivity. Graduate students from all departments and schools on campus are welcome. The final assignment is due by the end of the spring term and need not necessarily take the form of a twenty-page paper. Taught in English. Materials can be provided to cover the linguistic range of the group.
T 4pm-5:55pm

SPAN 7705a / CPLT 5070a / ER&M 6547a, Carceral Disability Studies: The Case of the Philippines  Aurelie Vialette

This seminar examines the racial, ethical, political, environmental, and social implications of the penal colonization process in the Philippines through the lens of disability studies. Carceral disability studies is in great need of exploration and that is the aim of this seminar. We analyze archival documents (manuscripts) from the Philippines and engage with theoretical and historical texts on disability, prison labor, racial capitalism, ecocriticism, Indigenous studies, carceral studies, gender studies, and law and the humanities. Overseas incarceration was a method employed by empires to dispose of criminals, the poor, sex workers, and vagrants. In the Philippines (a Spanish colony until 1898), the dispossession of indigenous people of their land and the implication of intensive farming were also consequences of the colonial project. We see that labor and procreation were crucial to using prisoners to build the colonial structure and strengthen the Spanish presence in the archipelago. We discover the centrality of this transnational and transhistorical approach to understanding the contemporary treatment of imprisoned people and the centrality of disability studies to understand mass incarceration today. Course in Spanish or English depending on the students enrolled. Spanish reading knowledge is mandatory.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

SPAN 8312a, Chronicle into Novel: Narrative and Journalism in Spanish America  Anibal González-Pérez

A study of the evolution of the literature-journalism relation in Spanish America that began in the 1880s, when burgeoning newspapers recruited as journalists young poets and fiction writers of the “modernista” movement. Their work gave rise to the “crónica” (chronicle), a hybrid genre of journalism and fictional narrative techniques that became an extremely popular and long-lasting form of Spanish American journalism until today.  “Cronistas” and novelists to be discussed include the Argentines Roberto Arlt, Rodolfo Walsh, Mariana Enríquez, and Martín Caparrós; Chileans Pedro Lemebel and Roberto Bolaño; Colombians José Asunción Silva and Gabriel García Márquez; Cubans Yoani Sánchez and Carlos Manuel Álvarez; Mexicans Salvador Novo, Carlos Monsiváis, Elena Poniatowska, and Guadalupe Nettel; and Puerto Ricans Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, Luis Rafael Sánchez, and Ana Teresa Toro.
M 9:25am-11:20am

SPAN 9211a, The Doctoral Workshop  Jesus Velasco

This course focuses on the prospectus and dissertation writing, grant applications, journal article publication, and pedagogy in literature and culture courses; required for graduate students in the third or fourth year.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

SPAN 9212a, The Professional Workshop  Alexander Gil Fuentes

Fall semester workshop series designed for professional development, including presentations on the academic and non-academic job markets, mock job talks, alumni visits, dissertation "chapter slams," and graduate student-organized events. All graduate students are expected to enroll and attend a minimum number of events per semester.   ½ Course cr
M 4pm-5:55pm

SPAN 9718b / ANTH 7818b / ER&M 6606b / WGSS 7718b, Multi-Sited Ethnography: Methodological Pivoting Under Duress  Eda Pepi and Ana Ramos-Zayas

In the face of resurgent authoritarianism, nativism, and assaults on academic freedom, this course examines ethnographic pivots under conditions of duress that are not exceptions but constitutive of the method itself. “Fieldsites choose us” as much as we choose them, pressing ethnographers to move with the currents of empire, capital, and knowledge production while reckoning with their limits. We retrace the genealogies of ethnographic practice and “turns” tethered to geopolitical demands: from the long shadow of “the native,” carried forward in avatars such as “the welfare queen” and “the terrorist,” to World War II–era area studies, Cold War intelligence collaborations, and the backlash against codified ethics in fieldwork and classrooms. Equally formative are the bureaucracies of academia—funding cycles, time-to-degree mandates, thematic calls, and the logics of publishing and tenure—that shape how ethnographers pose questions and frame methods. As some field sites become foreclosed and others newly thinkable, the very concept of “the field” splinters across multiple scales. What is “multi-sited” is not only movement across places but the doubleness of sites themselves—at once local and global, discrete and imbricated in imperial and transnational formations. Securitized borders, shrinking budgets, and the weaponization of academia leave open the question of whether these frictions will consolidate into a new “Americanist turn,” yet they press us to imagine the ethnographic otherwise. What becomes possible when archives, digital platforms, and mapping technologies are brought into conversation with participant observation and thick description? How might studies of diaspora, migration, enclaves, personhood, and neoliberal subjectivities be pursued not as fallback designs but as deliberate strategies? A flagship offering of the interdisciplinary Yale Ethnography Hub, the course welcomes graduate and undergraduate students across the humanities and social sciences—those preparing dissertations, senior essays, or fieldwork-driven projects, as well as those curious about ethnography’s possibilities and limits.
T 4pm-5:55pm

SPAN 9810a, Digital Humanities Practicum: Material Culture and AI  Alexander Gil Fuentes

Project-based learning and teams are at the heart of Digital Humanities (DH) pedagogy. Most projects in DH are produced by teams of scholars with complimentary skills and domain expertise, and we learn best how to produce digital scholarship while we are working on tangible outcomes with a team. This semester we will be working as a collective to leverage Large Language and Multi-modal AI Models to explore our own collections at Yale, and the possibilities for discovery and querying of archival materials leveraging these technologies. Grad students from Computer Science, any Humanities discipline, and related fields, who want to learn practical applications of contemporary computational technology are welcome. Undergraduates may join the practicum with instructor's permission.
T 4pm-5:55pm