Foreign Languages & Literatures (Graduate Program)

For information regarding the UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM, click here. 

Program Overview

Graduate study in Spanish has a long and distinguished tradition at LSU and has been enhanced by the recent approval of a redesigned MA in Hispanic Studies. The program offers the choice of a concentration in literary, linguistics, or cultural studies. Each option requires six hours in each of the other two areas and allows students the opportunity to take courses related to the Hispanic world in anthropology, geography, history, and political science.

The program is supported by a faculty that represents diverse areas of the Hispanic world and that is particularly strong in interdisciplinary approaches to the study of language, literature, and culture.

Administration

Admission

Applications and supporting materials for all graduate study must be submitted through the online application site for the LSU Graduate School: www.lsu.edu/gradapply. Official transcripts, official test scores, and other materials that come from third-party sources must be mailed to: Graduate Student Services, 114 West David Boyd Hall, Baton Rouge, LA 70803. These paper documents are stored electronically and departments have access to all materials submitted by and/or on behalf of a student applying to graduate study.

Applicants are expected to have a significant undergraduate background in Spanish, an above-average record on all undergraduate course work, acceptable GRE scores, and strongly supportive recommendations from at least three faculty members familiar with their academic work.

Financial Assistance

Information on graduate teaching assistantships and other forms of financial assistance is available from the graduate advisor.

Graduate Faculty

(check current listings by department by clicking this link)

Graduate Faculty who teach in Hispanic Studies

Elena Castro (7M) • 20th and 21st century Peninsular literature, modern Hispanic poetry and poetics, interdisciplinary approaches to Hispanic literature, women and gender studies
Alejandro Cortazar (7M) • Mexican literature and culture; 19th century Latin American literature; gender, identity, and nationstate formation in 20th century Latin America
Dorian Dorado (3F) • Pedagogy, second language acquisition
Christian Fernández-Palacios (M) • Colonial Latin American studies, Latin American narratives, literary theory, postcolonial studies, transcontinental studies
Gundela Hachmann (6A) • 19th and 20th century German literature, Media Studies, as well as Poetic and Literary Theory
Dorota Heneghan (6A) • Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Spanish Peninsular Literature and Culture, Interdisciplinary Approaches to Modern Spanish Culture, Comparative Literature, Contemporary German Women Writers, Women and Gender Studies
Jeremy King (M) • Spanish applied linguistics, pragmatics, politeness theory, second language acquisition, historical Spanish
Laura Martins (7M) • Southern Cone literature and film, Transatlantic studies, Luis Buñuel’s films, art and violence, film theory, literary theory, genre studies, photography
Carmela Mattza (6A) • Early Modern Spanish literature.
Andrea Morris (M) • 20th century literature and culture of the Hispanic Caribbean, Afro-Hispanic literature, resistance in Latin American literature and film, cultural studies
Rafael Orozco (6A) • Spanish in the United States, Latin American Spanish, Sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, bilingualism, Colombian Spanish
Joseph V. Ricapito (EM) • Golden Age literature, comparative literature: the picaresque and Petrarchism in European literature, Renaissance Italo-Hispanic literary relations, Conversos and converso literature

The following is a list of graduate faculty in other departments who teach courses in the Hispanic Studies cultural studies concentration:

M. Jill Brody (M) • (Department of Geography and Anthropology) Anthropological linguistics, Mayan linguistics, language and culture, discourse analysis
David Chicoine (6A) • (Department of Geography and Anthropology) Andean archaeology, Coastal Peru, early urbanism, material culture
Paul E. Hoffman (M) • (Department of History) Colonial Latin America, borderlands, Spain
Kent Mathewson (7M) • (Department of Geography and Anthropology) Latin American cultural and historical geography, geography and environmental concerns in Latin America, indigenous peoples and Latin American geography
Heather McKillop (7M) • (Department of Geography and Anthropology) Pre-Columbian archaeology, Mesoamerican archaeology, trade methods
Andrew Sluyter (7M) • (Department of Geography and Anthropology) Landscapes of colonialism, Latin America, development and environmental policy

Graduate faculty who teach courses in interdepartmental graduate programs:

Paolo Chirumbolo (6A) • Modern and contemporary Italian literature, Cinema Studies, Literary Theory, Cultural Studies
Kristopher Fletcher (6A) • Augustan Poetry, Greek and Roman Epic, Hellenistic Poetry, Mythology and Mythography
Touria Kannous (6A) • The Politics of Representation in African Women’s Literature and Film: Gender, Identity and Nationalism
Qiancheng Li (7M) • Premodern Chinese literature, comparative literature
Wilfred E. Major (6A) • Greek and Roman Comedy, Greek Pedagogy, Greek Rhetorical Theory
John D. Pizer (M) • 18th-21st Century German Literature and Thought, Comparative Literature, Theory and Practice of World Literature
Mark S. Wagner (6A) • Classical Arabic literature, Arabic vernacular literature, Islamic law, Muslim-Jewish relations
Richard G. Warga (3A) • Papyrology, Epigraphy, Coptic Studies
Gang Zhou (M) • Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Comparative Literature

RECENT FACULTY PUBLICATIONS

A representative sample of faculty publications during recent years includes the following:

Elena Castro, “Identidad lésbica: ausencia y presencia en la poesía de Gloria Fuertes”
Paolo Chirumbolo, Tra coscienza e autocoscienza. Rubbettino, Soveria Mannelli, 2009. Paolo Chirumbolo (coeditor). Neoavanguardia. Italian Experimental Literature and Arts in 1960s
Alejandro Cortazar, “Reforma, novela y nación: México en el siglo XIX”
Christian Fernández, “Inca Garcilaso: imaginación, memoria e identidad”
Kristopher Fletcher, “Systematic Genealogies in Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca and the Exclusion of Rome from Greek Myth.”
Dorota Heneghan, “What is a Man of Fashion? Manuel Pez and the Image of the Dandy in Galdós’ La de Bringas.”
Touria Khannous, “Islam, Gender, and Identity in Leila Abouzeid’s The Last Chapter: A Postcolonial Critique”
Jeremy King, “Pleas from the New World: The Structure of Directive Head Acts in Colonial Spanish Familiar Letters”
Quancheng Li, Fictions of Enlightenment: Journey to the West, Tower of Myriad Mirrors, and Dream of the Red Chamber
Wilfred Major, “Aristophanes and Alazoneia: Laughing at the Parabasis of Clouds.”
Laura Martins, “Luis Buñuel, or Ways of Disturbing Spectatorship”
Andrea Morris, “Performing Dance/Writing Dance: Embodiment and the Question of Female Agency in Afro-Antillean Poetry and Culture.”
Rafael Orozco, “Variation in the Expression of Nominal Possession in Costeño Spanish”
John Pizer, The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice
Mark S. Wagner, Like Joseph in Beauty: Yemeni Vernacular Poetry and Arab-Jewish Symbiosis
Richard Warga, “Three Fragments from the Berkeley Collection”
Gang Zhou, “The Chinese Renaissance: A Transcultural Reading”

Degree Programs

Programs

• Hispanic Studies, M.A.