SPAN 045. Plagas, epidemias y pandemias en el mundo global hispano

The Black Death, a catastrophic global outbreak of bubonic plague, devastated Asia in the mid-14th century and reached Europe through commercial ships sailing the Mediterranean Sea. The recent global pandemic caused by COVID-19 has reminded us that a virus is a silent passenger that can travel the world and change the trajectory of human history. This course proposes a literary, medical, religious, and cultural history of the crises caused by infectious diseases in the Global Hispanic world, focusing on the representations of plagues, epidemics, and pandemics from the Medieval era to the 21st century. Through the study of a literary, pictorial, and cinematographic corpus, we will explore concepts such as stigma, trauma, endemic, apocalyptic scenarios, famines, pestilences, confinement, death, fake news, among others. At the end of the semester, it is expected that students will be able to understand some ideas and concerns of the crises caused by spreadable diseases that emerged in the 14th-17th centuries and remained relevant in later periods. Similarly, they will reflect on health crises as repetitive phenomena with a global impact that transcends geographical and temporal boundaries affecting the Hispanic world socially, economically, religiously, and culturally. Reading materials will be available in contemporary Spanish.
Prerequisite: SPAN 022, SPAN 023, the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Humanities.
1 credit.
Spring 2025. Hernández.
Catalog chapter: Spanish
Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/spanish

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