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Are you eager to improve your skills in foreign language, so you can work and live abroad and become a citizen of the world? Do you like small classes with lots of student interaction and faculty involvement? Committed to gaining the essential life skills to analyze, explain, and persuade?
The Department of Romance Languages & Literatures offers a rich variety of courses in the languages, culture, and literatures of France, Spain, Latin America, and Latina/o populations in the United States. Many of these courses are cross-listed with the programs in Gender and Women's Studies, Chicano Studies, and Latin American Studies. In addition to courses on important authors (from Cervantes to Proust), literary genres (from the great tradition of the novel to the dramatic impact of theater), and periods (from the Middle Ages to the new millennium), the Department offers innovative classes in cultural studies, history, and film, including Paris: Myth or Reality?, Images of Latin America in Fiction and Film, Writing the Exotic in Nineteenth-Century France, Poverty and Social Justice in Imperial Spain, Cannibalizing Surrealism, Tradition and Transgression in Spanish Film, and Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad.
Romance Languages and Literatures faculty is also one of the most diverse in the College, hailing from many countries and representing a wide range of cultural backgrounds.
Jack Abecassis has written extensively on philosophical aspects of French literature and on French Renaissance thinker Michel de Montaigne. He is the author of
Albert Cohen: Dissonant Voices, a prize-winning study of the twentieth-century French-Jewish novelist and diplomat Albert Cohen. Paul Cahill’s work centers on contemporary Spanish literature and culture, with a special emphasis on poetry written from 1966 to the present. He has interviewed some of the most eminent living poets in Spain. José R. Cartagena-Calderón’s research focuses on the literary and cultural production of Spain and the Americas from the late fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, with special emphasis on the construction of early modern masculinities and non-normative sexualities. His book,
Masculinidades en obras: el drama de la hombría en la España imperial was published in 2008.
Suzanne Chávez-Silverman has published extensively on modern and contemporary Latin American and U.S. Latina/o literature and culture, with a particular focus on gender, sexuality, language, and poetry. She is co-editor of
Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representation of Latinidad
and Reading and Writing the Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American and Spanish Culture, and author of
Killer Crónicas: Bilingual Memories, a groundbreaking book written in an uncompromising, completely bilingual mix of Spanish and English. Mary Coffey’s research focuses on nineteenth-century Spanish romanticism and realism, particularly the work of the novelists Benito Pérez Galdós and Leopoldo Alas. Grace Dávila-López works on contemporary Latin American theatre, performance studies and popular culture, particularly on the topic of Puerto Rican national identity in the era of globalization. Nivia Montenegro specializes in contemporary Latin American narrative, in particular, Cuban literature and culture, self-representation and nation-building. She co-edited
Infantería, a critical anthology of the works of Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and her collection of poems,
Mi música en otra parte, appeared in Spain in 2001.
Virginie Pouzet-Duzer works in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature and culture, focusing on the Avant-garde art and literary movements (from Impressionism to Surrealism), as well as the interactions between texts and images in art (literature, painting and cinema). Monique Saigal has published extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature, and in recent years has written numerous articles on contemporary French women writers. Her recent book, based on interviews of twenty women who were in the French Resistance during WWII, is titled
Héroïnes françaises 1940-1945. Courage, force et ingéniosité. Margaret Waller is renowned for her work in women's studies, particularly the question of gender in nineteenth-century French literature. She is the author of the book
The Male Malady: Fictions of Impotence in the French Romantic Novel and translated
Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language.
Pomona students have the opportunity to study with these distinguished faculty members from the time they enter the College as freshmen; all faculty members in Romance Languages & Literatures teach a mix of courses involving both language acquisition and literature/culture. Enrollment in language and literature classes is limited, ensuring that all students participate actively in class discussions.
Our students are as multidisciplinary as our faculty; many take double majors in Spanish or French and another field. Students graduating with majors in French or Spanish in recent years have been accepted into some of the nation's most prestigious graduate programs in those fields, including Harvard, Yale, UC Berkeley, Brown, Cornell, and Wisconsin. Others go on to careers in the law, medicine, science, education, international development and many other fields.
Pomona's program in Romance Languages & Literatures is enhanced by a state-of-the-art
Foreign Language Resource Center (FLRC) whose mission is to help faculty and students to better teach and learn foreign languages through the creative use of technology in and outside of the classroom. Students can also improve their command of French and Spanish by residing in the
Oldenborg Center for Foreign Languages and International Relations and participating in the programs there, which include daily language tables at lunch, frequent study breaks featuring cultural programming, and a foreign language film series Most students also spend at least a semester at one of Pomona's
Study Abroad programs in France, Cameroon,
Senegal, Spain, Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador or Mexico.
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