Spring 2026 Graduate Courses
SPAN 5140/7140 Seminar: Spanish Literature, Medieval Period
When Virtue Goes Rogue: The Passions in Medieval and Early Modern Times
Tuesdays 3:30 鈥 6:00pm
Prof. N煤ria Silleras-Fern谩ndez
This seminar is designed for graduate and advanced undergraduate students with听
differentiated workloads in each case. It examines the complex and often paradoxical tensions听
between good and bad behavior, virtue and transgression, emotion and reason, health and听
sickness, and acceptability and deviance, as represented in late medieval and early modern听
Iberian culture and literature. While certain writers envisioned an 鈥渋deal society鈥 marked by rigid听
hierarchies, binary notions of gender, and religious difference between Jews, Christians,听
Muslims, and converts as the principal marker of prejudice, many others revealed a different听
social reality characterized by fluidity, gender performativity, cultural permeability, and听
sustained interaction between majority and minority communities. We will explore how literary听
texts both reinforced and challenged hegemonic discourses, participating in the continual听
negotiation of power, morality, and identity. Special attention will be given to how these texts听
were later reinterpreted to align with shifting emotional regimes. Our discussions on what was听
conceived as good and bad behavior, and in what contexts, will engage canonical and non-canonical works alike, situating them within contemporary debates in Iberian, Mediterranean,听
and Transatlantic studies. The course is taught in Spanish.听
For more information, please contact Prof. N煤ria Silleras-Fern谩ndez at silleras@colorado.edu
Wednesdays 3:35 - 6:05pm
Prof. John Kennedy Godoy
Tuesday/Thursday 2:00 - 3:15pm
Prof. Esther Brown
Many well-understood linguistic, extralinguistic and/or discourse~pragmatic factors shape variant realizations of sounds, words and constructions in target production contexts. These phonetic and morphosyntactic variants of words and/or constructions, arising in production contexts, become registered in memory as lexically specific variants. Thus, contexts of use affect linguistic productions and such productions, in turn, are stored as lexical representations. Nevertheless, words and constructions differ significantly with regard to their exposure to conditioning factors of the production context. That is, opportunity biases arise naturally in discourse whereby some words co-occur with specific conditioning factors significantly more than other words do, giving rise to patterns of synchronic variation and diachronic change indicative of words鈥 accumulation in memory of contextual conditioning effects. In this course, we will closely examine implications of these probabilistic patterns of use. We will consider different examples of conditioning factors, types of conditioning contexts, and research that explores correlations between contextual conditioning effects and variant forms of words. The course will review theories that attempt to account for the patterns of phonological variation, propose methods for testing the effect of contextual conditioning, and explore potential applications to acquisition and bilingual data. Students will work to identify and test novel applications of lexically specific contextualized conditioning.
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