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What is Hispanic Studies?

Hispanic studies is a field in humanities broadly concerned with the languages and cultures of the vast “Hispanic” world, extending chronologically from Roman Hispania and pre-Columbian peoples to the present, and geographically from New York to Patagonia, from Spain and Equatorial Guinea to the Pacific coast of the Americas.

In addition to language, our discipline studies cultural production—literature, film, art, and other forms of representation. The fields and the perspectives of these studies are extensive, as all disciplines dealing with cultural production, literature, and the arts. Hispanic studies imply an array of philosophical, literary, aesthetical, historical, linguistic, anthropological, and sociopolitical approaches and methods of analysis.

Current Directions in Our Discipline

Traditionally, Spanish programs were mostly concerned with philology: the study of language in texts and the study of literature in historical perspective. Scholarly practices like linguistics, language pedagogy, and bilingual education have influenced the field for many years. However, in recent decades, theoretical and interdisciplinary endeavors such as cultural, post-colonial, ethnic, and gender studies have broadened the field’s scope.

Cultural studies are an attempt to broaden traditional patterns in the study of cultural production in order to include not only literature and the arts but also alternative creative languages and new and emerging forms of aesthetical, social, political, cultural, and gender representation. While gender and ethnic studies focus on different ways of deconstructing and destabilizing exclusionary social and cultural knowledge and practices, post-colonial studies are concerned with the particular and often differing ways in which societies are working through the aftermath of colonialism.