Program Director: Dr. Erika M. Sutherland, Associate Professor of Spanish
Professors: Lugo Herrera, Olid Guerrero, Trauger
Lecturers: Lebrón, Moreno, Qualtere
The Spanish section has implemented a significant reworking of our program, in the belief that our new curriculum better reflects the values of today’s students, teachers, and scholars. New ideas, new perspectives, and new voices all call for a new plan, a plan that comes with a sense of urgency and hope.
Over the past several years, your Spanish faculty have been working hard to decolonize our curriculum. This means to re-conceive and re-center our curriculum, opening up a broader set of texts, voices, questions, and possibilities from around the world and both present now and drawn from the past.
Our new curriculum features reconfigured, revised, and wholly new courses:
- For our students interested in using Spanish in academic and professional contexts: a more robust selection of specialized language classes (Spanish for Business, for Healthcare, for Social Justice…)
- Instead of Peninsular and Latin American classes arranged chronologically: culture classes spanning the Atlantic and focusing on specific issues (cuisine, brujería, media…) and literature courses centered on universal themes and incorporating new texts and perspectives (migrations, medicine, marginal voices)
- For our heritage speakers: a sequence of classes specially designed to interest, challenge, and address the specific needs of students speaking and listening Spanish without formal training in academic and professional reading and writing.
The Spanish language opens doors to an extraordinarily wide and deep range of literatures, cultures, and experiences. The Spanish program at Muhlenberg offers students the opportunity to explore the deep histories and complex present-day realities of Spain and Latin America and the rich literatures created by many and diverse voices. Our curriculum centers on the global Hispanic world, including not only Spain but also the many cultures, languages, and traditions that have intersected with and continue to enrich the Spanish-speaking world. Muhlenberg’s location in Allentown, a city where more than half of the population is Hispanic and LatinX, provides a setting where students can easily interact in Spanish and over Hispanic cuisines with immigrants from all over the Spanish-speaking world. The Spanish program features a series of community-engaged classes in which students work in and collaborate with local organizations serving Spanish-speaking and LatinX neighbors.
Heritage speakers of Spanish –students raised in a home where Spanish was spoken but who may have had little or no formal training in Spanish—are an important part of our learning community. We have a specially designed sequence of language courses for heritage speakers and provide opportunities in upper-level, community-engaged classes that leverage the intercultural and communicative gifts they bring.
We encourage our majors to study abroad in a Spanish-speaking country; in addition to multiple semester-, summer-, or year-long programs in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Spain, Muhlenberg’s Spanish program offers short-term study abroad (MILA) programs in Panama and Puerto Rico. Study abroad programs often allow students to pursue their other areas of study in Spanish: our faculty will advise you carefully to see how you can most effectively leverage your language skills with your other interests. Courses taken abroad through other institutions are pre-approved for inclusion in the program through the advising process.
Language is very much central to the Spanish program, and so we include only Spanish-language courses as part of our major. Courses taught in English do not count towards a Spanish major, but often provide invaluable insight into the beauty and complexities of the world. For this reason, we also encourage our students to broaden their experience in Hispanic, Latin American, Caribbean, and LatinX cultures through courses taught in English in Art History (ARH), Comparative Literature Studies (CLS), History (HST), Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LAC), Media and Communication (COM), Theatre (THR), and Women’s and Gender Studies (WST).
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