Spanish at Kenyon

The Spanish program offers four years of instruction in language, literature, culture, and film. Students may minor or major in Spanish. We offer three different tracks to declaring Spanish as a major: one-language (Spanish) track; two-language (Spanish and another MLL language) track; and the interdisciplinary (Spanish and another discipline) track.

Students in the yearlong beginner course — Self and Society: Intensive Introductory Spanish — meet four times a week with the professor and three or four times a week with an Apprentice Teacher (AT) for practice sessions. The ATs are fellow undergraduate students who are either native speakers or advanced students of Spanish.

Students in the yearlong intermediate course in Spanish — Language and Culture: Intermediate Spanish — meet with the professor three times a week and an AT once per week. In this course, students continue to study and practice the language while engaging with the culture that uses the language through culture and literature readings as well as television and film assignments.

The final course in which students study language specifically in the Spanish curriculum is Literature and Film: Advanced Writing in Spanish (Spanish 321). In this course, students practice their analytical and creative writing in Spanish and engage with authentic cultural artifacts and typical problem areas for English speakers learning Spanish.

Once students have taken (or been placed beyond) Literature and Film: Advanced Writing in Spanish, all of the upper-level Spanish courses are available to them. Four courses are introduction to literature courses and focus on analytical writing and literary analysis while providing a survey of literature. Other courses in the Spanish program explore literature, culture, film, and linguistics from all over the world and time periods from the Middle Ages to the present. All of these courses are the product of passionate teacher-scholars who want to broaden the world for their students and help them understand the role of Spanish and the people who speak it, create art in it, and form their communities through it.

A number of our current and former students have been awarded prestigious scholarships and fellowships, and several have received PhDs from top graduate programs. Our alumni have used their Spanish studies to forge rewarding careers in teaching, medicine, law, business, government, foreign relations, and other fields.