With strength in film, music, art, and literature and its vibrant intellectual community, Boston University is an ideal place for graduate study in Spanish.
Our graduate program in Hispanic Language & Literatures offers advanced literature, culture and cinema courses leading to the Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy. The curriculum provides students with a rich experience in reading and interpreting a wide variety of literary, filmic, linguistic, and cultural texts.
The small size of our classes facilitates interaction between an excellent cohort of graduate students and faculty who are leaders in their respective fields. Our Spanish faculty boasts diverse expertise and interests, including cross-cultural exchanges in medieval Iberia; gender and sexuality studies, women’s literature, theories of authorship, and ecofeminism; the Latin American and Iberian avant-gardes and their legacies; and the study of leading figures in Spanish and Latin American literature.
The Romance Studies “Voces Hispánicas” program, funded by Santander Bank, offers a wealth of concerts, films, and lectures. Our Hispanic Graduate Student Association (AEGE), in cooperation with the French graduate students, organizes an annual graduate student conference that attracts participants from throughout the United States and beyond.
BU’s Cinema & Media Studies, hosted in the Romance Studies Department, supplies our students with engaging lectures and film screenings/discussions and also furnishes them with the opportunity to spend a semester as the teaching fellow for a class in the cinema studies program.
BU’s very active Latin American Studies Center generates a continual flow of events featuring writers, thinkers, filmmakers and other figures of note from the Hispanic world. Faculty and students collaborate with the MFA in Spanish Literary Translation. Boston-area study consortia and other BU centers for regional and thematic studies, such as the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program, further enrich the life of our campus.
A plentitude of language and humanities organizations support graduate-student teaching and research. The Instituto Cervantes at nearby Harvard University sponsors numerous lectures, graduate-student symposia, and other events of interest. Additionally, the Boston area hosts consulates from ten countries of the Spanish and Portuguese speaking world.
Our program also offers students opportunities beyond the Boston area. Through a partnership with Boston University’s highly regarded study-abroad programs, our graduate students have the opportunity to serve as tutors for a summer at BU’s undergraduate program in Madrid. We also support one or two students each summer to attend the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory.
Spanish Program Contacts
Christopher Maurer
Associate Chair of Romance Studies, Head of Spanish Section, Professor of Spanish
chmaurer@bu.edu