Hispanic Studies at Durham

The Spanish courses offered by the Department can be started at two levels: beginners (including those who have a GCSE in Spanish) and post-A Level. Entrants with AS Level Spanish normally join the 2nd year of the beginners' stream. Both language streams merge in the final year.

Excellent teaching and learning resources at Durham are complemented by access to an exciting range of opportunities for study or employment during the year abroad, including Erasmus exchanges with the universities of Salamanca, Alcalá de Henares, Santiago de Compostela, Vigo, Cádiz, Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), and Granada. Thanks to the support of the Catalan Government, we also offer the chance to study Catalan language and culture in the second and final years.

Our research on Spanish and Latin American literature and culture feeds into undergraduate modules that explore a dazzling variety of cultural forms and their historical and intellectual contexts, looking at topics such as:

• cultural identities in Latin American painting, photography, and film;
• sex and sainthood in medieval Spanish literature;
• memories of the civil war in novels and plays of Francoist and post-Francoist Spain;
• national and gender identities in contemporary Spanish cinema;
• myth and history in medieval Spanish chronicles and epic poems;
• music, literature, and popular culture in Latin America;
• early modern Latin American medical and scientific writing;
• avant-garde imaginations in Atlantic literature and culture;
• postcolonial theory, subalternity, feminism, and gender studies in the Caribbean;
• Hispanic linguistics, language contact, language aquisition, and pedagogy.

Most of the teaching of cultural and intellectual topics is carried out in English, to ensure that it is accessible to students who have started our courses as beginners in Spanish and that all students can engage with the texts and issues at an advanced level.