Spanish Spring 2026

SPAN 1020 Elementary Spanish ll with Daniel Colon

MoWeFr 8:00am-8:50am; 9:00am - 9:50am

This course, designed for students with no prior experience in Spanish, develops listening, speaking, reading and writing skills through engagement with oral and written texts in Spanish and interactive projects. Enables students to perform linguistic tasks that allow them to communicate in highly predictable everyday situations (e.g. expressing basic personal information and needs).

SPAN 1060 Accelerated Elementary Spanish with Matthew Street

MoWeFr 9:00am - 9:50am; 10:00am - 10:50am; 12:00pm - 12:50pm

This course develops listening, speaking, reading and writing skills through engagement with oral and written texts in Spanish and interactive projects. It covers the material from SPAN 1010-1020 in an accelerated one-semester format, enabling students to perform linguistic tasks that allow them to communicate in common everyday situations (e.g., greeting, narrating, describing, ordering, comparing and contrasting).

SPAN 2010 Intermediate Spanish with Daniel Colón​, Esperanza Górriz Jarque, Sara Young, Kate Neff, Filadelfia Soto, Francis Whitfill

MoWeFr 8:00am - 8:50am; 10:00am - 10:50am; 11:00am - 11:50am

TuTh 8:00am - 9:15am; 9:30am - 10:45am; 11:00am - 12:15pm; 12:30pm - 1:45pm; 2:00pm - 3:15pm; 3:30pm - 4:45pm

This course further develops listening, speaking, reading and writing skills through engagement with authentic, culturally rich oral and written texts in Spanish. Enables students to perform linguistic tasks that allow them to communicate in everyday situations (e.g., narrating present and past activities and expressing desires and requests), and to express personal meaning by creating with the language.

SPAN 2020 Advanced Intermediate Spanish with Jennifer Barlow, Germain Badang, David Florez-Murillo, Tammy Hertel, Jennifer Hogg, Jesús Játiva, Ana Piriz

MoWeFr 8:00am - 8:50am; 9:00am - 9:50am; 10:00am - 10:50am; 11:00am - 11:50am; 12:00pm - 12:50pm; 1:00pm - 1:50pm; 2:00pm - 2:50pm; 3:00pm - 3:50pm

TuTh 9:30-10:45am; 11:00am - 12:15pm; 2:00pm - 3:15pm; 3:30pm - 4:45pm; 5:00pm - 6:15pm; 6:30pm - 7:45pm

This course further develops listening, speaking, reading and writing skills through engagement with authentic, culturally rich oral and written texts in Spanish. Enables students to perform linguistic tasks that allow them to communicate in everyday situations with some complications (e.g., describing present, past and future activities, expressing opinions, and persuading), and to express personal meaning by creating with the language. Completion of this course fulfills the College of Arts and Sciences World Language Requirement.

SPAN 3000 The Sounds of Spanish with Joel Rini

TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm

SPAN 3010 Finding Your Voice in Spanish with Eliud Segura Encarnacion, Tammy Hertel, Esther Poveda Moreno, Ciara Raczyk

MoWeFr 9:00am - 9:50am; 10:00am - 10:50am; 11:00am - 11:50am; 12:00pm - 12:50pm; 1:00pm - 1:50pm; 2:00pm - 2:50pm

TuTh 8:00am - 9:30am

Imagine the incredible sense of achievement and empowerment you’ll feel when you confidently express yourself in another language! In SPAN 3010, you will explore your evolving proficiency in Spanish by engaging with and creating three cultural texts: a brief memoir, a news story, and a film review. Through examining selected examples of these text types in Spanish, you will grasp the rationale behind specific writing techniques, stylistic choices, and linguistic structures within each genre and their impact on the construction of meaning. You will ultimately acquire a personalized toolkit of linguistic and stylistic devices for crafting your texts. This course treats reading, listening, speaking, and writing not merely as isolated linguistic skills but as interconnected methods for building effective communication. As a participant in this course, you will establish personal learning objectives, enhance your conversational skills in Spanish, assemble a portfolio of your written work, and engage actively with our writing community through discussions, peer evaluations, recitals, and various interactive activities.

SPAN 3015 Spanish for Heritage Learners with Maria Esparza Rodriguez

TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm

SPAN 3020 Elevate Your Spanish with Robert Sanchis

MoWeFr 11:00am - 11:50am

SPAN 3020 seeks to develop advanced literacy in Spanish through extensive analysis and discussion of journalistic and literary texts, and documentaries and films from the Spanish-speaking world. We will focus especially on analyzing and learning advanced and late-acquisition grammatical structures and on how grammar and meaning interact to construct the language and textual structures expected in the following types of essays: and op-ed, a literary review, and an academic essay.    

SPAN 3030 Cultural Conversations with Nicole Bonino

TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am 

Ready to take your Spanish-speaking skills to the next level? This interactive course is designed to help you develop fluency through dynamic discussions, creative projects, and real-world engagement. Explore the cultures of Spain, Latin America, and the Caribbean through film, art, and performance. Enhance your speaking skills through interactions with guest speakers and generative AI platforms. To express yourself confidently in Spanish while immersing yourself in the richness of the Spanish-speaking world, you will engage in both individual and collaborative projects aimed at refining your spoken and written Spanish, preparing you for academic and professional settings.

SPAN 3040 Business Spanish with Maria Esparza Rodriguez

TuTh 9:30am -10:45am 11:00am - 12:15pm

This is an intermediate level course in which students read, research, discuss, debate and write in Spanish about recent themes that are relevant to commercial and economic contexts in the Spanish-speaking world. It is a language class that focusses on Spanish in professional settings; no previous academic or practical experience in commerce is required.

SPAN 3050 Spanish for Medical Professionals with Alicia López Operé 

TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm; 12:30pm - 1:45pm

Spanish for Medical Professions, is a recommended course for students that want to have a career in the health professions, and also for those who need to interact with Spanish-speaking people in hospitals, clinics and similar spaces. The course has been designed to develop linguistic competency as well as cultural competency in the health context. The emphasis is put on the real use of the language and the understanding of cultural differences among Spanish-speaking countries and the United States, and Latino patients in the United States. The course has a background theme on contemplative practices. 

SPAN 3070 Community Engagement with Esther Poveda Moreno 

MoWeFr 1:00pm - 1:50pm 

Sí se puede: Community Engagements in Spanish-Speaking Charlottesville is an advanced conversation course with a community-based language element component. In this specific iteration of SPAN 3070, we will focus on the role of education as a tool for social change in the Spanish speaking world. As part of the course requirements, students will volunteer as bilingual tutors and mentors with the Center for Community Partnership’s Starr Hills Pathway Program. Through community work, engagement with course materials (podcasts, documentaries, graphic novels, short stories, and testimonials), and conversations with guest speakers, we will reflect on the importance of education as the foundation to build more fair, inclusive, and equitable societies, and how this is manifested in the local and broader Spanish speaking world.

SPAN 3200 Intro Hispanic Linguistics with Lorena Albert Ferrando

TuThu 12:30pm - 1:45pm 

The course objective is to provide an introduction into the core areas of linguistic analysis using Spanish as the test case. During the semester, we will cover several areas including: the sounds of Spanish (phonetics and phonology), word formation (morphology), sentence structure (syntax), meaning of words, phrases, sentences, and larger chunks of discourse, also in social context (semantics and pragmatics), history of the Spanish language, regional and social variation (dialectology and sociolinguistics), and language acquisition.

SPAN 3300 Texts and Interpretations with Nicole Bonino, Erica Cobb, Nieves Garcia Prados, Fernando Valverde

MoWeFr 11:00am - 11:50am; 3:00pm - 4:45pm

TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm; 2:00pm - 3:15pm

This intermediate level course introduces the student of Spanish to the fundamentals of reading and understanding various genres, and to practice discussing, analyzing, and writing about them in an academic register in Spanish. It draws on texts and materials from both Spain and Latin America, and builds students’ specialized vocabulary. All work for the class, including reading, discussion, and writing, is done in Spanish. SPAN 3300 is a prerequisite for the survey courses. 

SPAN 3400 Spain: From Kingdom to Empire (1200-1700) with Fernando Riva

TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm

SPAN 3410 Perspectives on Modern Spain (1800 to the Present) with Kelly Moore

TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm

SPAN 3420 Politics and Power in the Early Americas (1492-1800) with Fernando Operé 

MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm

Este es un curso dedicado al estudio de la literatura que se escribió sobre América desde la llegada de Cristóbal Colón hasta la independencia de América Latina.

Los primeros escritos fueron crónicas y diarios de aventureros, soldados, monjes, o simplemente viajeros, que hoy nos parecen literatura fantástica. Puede citarse los fascinantes relatos del encuentro de Hernán Cortes en su llegada a México (Tenochtitlan), de Francisco Pizarro a Perú (Cusco), y las aventuras o fracasos de muchos aventureros arriba y abajo del nuevo continente (Cabeza de Vaca, Hernando de Soto ente otros). Se incluyen viajes de científicos que llegaron al continente a describir su flora y su fauna (Darwin, Humboldt) y textos que dan cuenta del modo en que España diseñó el Nuevo Mundo que consistía en la fundación de ciudades cristiana, la creación nuevas fronteras, y una sociedad integrada en un calidoscopio de razas.

SPAN 3430 Contemporary Latin American Voices (1800 to the present) with Elizabeth Mirabal

TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am

This course offers a survey of Latin American literature, inviting students to engage with the sociocultural context in which it has evolved from 1800 to the present. As we delve into a variety of short stories, poems, novels, essays, diaries, letters, and autobiographies, we will uncover how the region’s diverse cultures, peoples, and significant historical events have shaped its literary landscape. You will have the chance to express your thoughts and feelings through critical and creative reflection exercises, developing essential skills, such as close reading, debate, and informed and thoughtful writing in Spanish. Upon completing the seminar, you will have a rich interpretive appreciation of Latin America’s diverse literary tradition from the nineteenth century to the present.

SPAN 4040 Translation Spanish to English​ with Erica Cobb & Nieves García Prados​  

MoWeFr 1:00pm - 1:50pm

TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am; 11:00am - 12:15pm

"Lost & Found in Translation" offers an introduction to the "art" of translation, both in practice and theory. Throughout the semester students participate in a series of workshops, collaborating on translations of texts of different genres, from multiple time periods and countries through in-depth readings and discussions, translation activities from Spanish to English and vice versa. This is a dynamic, interactive, inter-disciplinary course. Prerequisites: SPAN 3300, and highly recommended one/two survey(s) of literature and culture (SPAN 3400-3430). For Spanish majors we advise both surveys to be taken before SPAN 4040 (or simultaneously) since surveys cannot be taken during the 4th year.

SPAN 4202 Spanish Social Dimension with Omar Mendoza Velazquez 

MoWe 3:00pm - 4:45pm

SPAN 4403 Structures - SPAN with Joel Rini 

TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm

SPAN 4520 Special Topics Seminar: Culture & Civilization with Ricardo Padrón & Samuel Amago 

W  3:30pm - 6:00pm

TuTh 9:30am - 10:45pm

The goal of this course is to critically examine how language and systemic power relations are co-naturalized and how this linkage is constructed, manifested, and underpinned in our everyday language use and identity, as well as in our perception of other groups and speakers. We will focus on Spanish language environments (and in the US in particular) but the contents of the course are applicable to other languages and settings.

SPAN 4530 From Research to Action: Second Language Acquisition and Applied Linguistics of Spanish with Lorena Albert Ferrando 

TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm

Have you ever wondered how you learned Spanish? Are you curious about why certain teaching methods worked for you—or didn’t? Are you interested in how research can enhance your language acquisition process? Do you want to understand the science behind language learning and teaching?  Are you considering a career in Spanish education or thinking about volunteering in the field? Whether you are planning a future in language education or simply eager to explore your own language journey, this course will guide you through key linguistic theories and approaches. Through class discussion of papers, we will investigate the processes behind the acquisition of Spanish, discover how cognitive mechanisms interact with teaching methods, and learn to apply these insights to practical settings.

SPAN 4559 Becoming a Poet in Spanish with Fernando Valverde 

TuTh 3:30 - 4:45pm 

Seven poets from different Spanish-speaking countries visit the class to talk with students about how they became famous poets. This creative writing class in Spanish is taught by one of today's most acclaimed Spanish-language poets, who was nominated for a Latin Grammy for his songwriting.

SPAN 4710 Latin American Culture & Civilization with Fernando Operé

MoWe 5:00pm - 6:15pm 

SPAN 7220 History of the Language with Omar Mendoza Velazquez

MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm

SPAN 7850 Themes and Genres: 

Global Spanish Cinema with Samuel Amago 

M 3:30pm - 6:00pm

Cinematic Time and Care with Kelly Moore

Th 3:30pm - 6:00pm

This course provides an overview of contemporary feminist debates about care work from the perspective of Iberian cinema. What can cinema tell us about the material conditions of possibility for the circulation of labor, about social reproduction? The concept of reproductivism offers a material and figurative analytic for thinking about the subordination of life-making to production. We will combine political theory, feminist thought, and film theory to attend to those indispensable infrastructures which reproduce labor power but also allow for the persistence of collectives through time. What do filmic texts tell us about the relationship between cinematic time and the time of reproduction, between labor and gender, between politics and mothering, between coercion and care? This course will be taught in English. It counts for the WGS graduate certificate.

SPAN 7900 Portfolio Development with Charlotte Rogers 

T 3:30pm - 6:00pm