Classes and Professors

FULL COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

COMM 336 – Explorations in Cross Cultural Culture for Living Abroad (3 credit hours)

This course provides an introduction to key issues in cross-cultural communication theory to develop students’ understanding of communication between/among people of different cultural backgrounds and identities, particularly while living abroad. Given our program’s location in Spain, we will pay particular attention to Spanish cultural norms and communicative practices, including cultural expression through the arts, visual culture and foodways. The course focuses on the development of cultural awareness (self and others), and balances attention to concepts and principles with experientially-based study designed to help you improve your cross-cultural communication skills and competence, while studying abroad.

COMM 410 – Analysis of Communication Practice: Spanish Film in Focus (4 credit hours

This is an advanced writing course designed to provide you with an understanding of, and the ability to analyze and evaluate, how media texts reflect and perpetuate societal norms and the values that inform them.  In this course, students will be exposed to a variety of theories, methods, and approaches to media criticism, and provided with the opportunity to critically engage films exploring various cultural, political, and social facets of Spanish life, both past and present. In particular, we will focus our attention on filmic representations of gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, and class, examining films set in Spain by Spanish and non-Spanish film auteurs.  NOTE: This course counts toward the Women’s and Gender Studies Major and Minor.

COMM 480 – Capstone in Communication: Destination Spain! Experiencing and Investigating Communication and Culture Abroad (3 credit hours)

This course is designed to explore the relationships between communication and culture in a variety of contexts and to gain a deeper understanding of these relationships as they bear on our personal, professional and academic lives. As such, we will explore our roles as communicators in the many different “cultures” of which we are a part throughout our lives, but particularly as visitors to another country. Further, COMM 480 will prepare you to engage in qualitative research in communication, specifically focusing on ethnographic approaches to investigating and writing about communication and culture. Upon our arrival in Trujillo, we will be active culture learners, immersing ourselves in Spanish ways of living. In preparation for field study projects to be completed late in the semester, we will be studying ethnographic methods of data collection, and designing research projects employing these research methods with which to collect data in Spain. In the Spring 481 course, we will be reporting our findings from these research projects in the form of ethnographic essays.

ENGL 350:  Hemingway in Spain (3 credit hours)

This class focuses on the writer Ernest Hemingway and his works that are either set in Spain or have an important connection to Spain.  Since the course is being taught as part of the College of Charleston’s semester-long program in Trujillo, we will be living in and visiting some of the places Hemingway wrote about.  In addition to reading several of Hemingway’s fictional works, we’ll also read portions of a biography about him, as well as watch the propagandist documentary film he co-wrote, narrated, and helped produce, The Spanish Earth.  Topics we’ll cover in the course include Hemingway and literary modernism, ritual and myth-making in Hemingway’s Spain, gender issues in Hemingway, Hemingway’s treatment of war and war trauma, his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, and style and form in Hemingway’s work.  Note:  This class counts as a General Education Humanities requirement

ENGL 364:  Contemporary Latina Writers (3 credit hours)

This course focuses on contemporary literature written in the U.S. by women of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban heritage, all places that were historically part of the Spanish Empire. We will read and discuss fiction, poetry, and non-fiction by writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrie Moraga, Helena Maria Viramontes, Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, and Carmen Maria Machado, among others.  Topics we’ll cover in the course include cultural identity, assimilation, and resistance; language use—including bilingualism and Spanglish; immigrant and refugee experiences; reworkings/revisions of traditional religion, myth and history; borderlands and hybrid identities; and intersections of ethnicity with gender, class, and sexuality.  It is especially fitting that we will study these writers in Trujillo, a city at the center of Spanish colonization and the birthplace of many conquistadors, including the famous Francisco Pizarro. The legacies of Spanish exploration and colonization, as we will see, still affect contemporary peoples and cultures today. Note: This class counts as a General Education Humanities requirement.  It also counts toward the Women’s and Gender Studies major and minor.

ENGL 366 OR  ENGL 339:  Travel Writing (3 credit hours)

This course is designed specifically for study abroad in Trujillo, Spain.  Students will supplement their experience of travel by reading, analyzing, and evaluating various travel-writing genres, especially texts dealing with Spain and Europe.  This is also a writing course:  students will write their own travelogues, with an emphasis either on literary, creative non-fiction (for ENGL 339 students) or on digital media (for ENGL 366 students).  Note:  ENGL 339 counts as a General Education Humanities Requirement.