Department of Spanish & Portuguese

The Department of Spanish & Portuguese is invested in being a truly diverse and inclusive community in which individuals of any gender, race, ethnicity, disability status, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, cultural upbringing, language variety, and socioeconomic standing can flourish equally. We believe that diversity and inclusion are fundamental characteristics of a rich academic community. We aim at fostering the exploration and expression of differing ideas, beliefs, and perspectives, especially those of the most vulnerable members of society. In fulfilling our mission to advance diversity, we seek to recruit, hire, retain, reward, and promote people from different backgrounds to increase the number, visibility, and well-being of underrepresented people.

As modern notions of race have their roots in Iberian history and processes of colonization, the Department of Spanish & Portuguese is particularly committed to studying and confronting all forms of racism and its attendant ideologies, such as ableism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, and anti-Semitism. We learn from and celebrate the political struggles of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and other racialized peoples across Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries, including the United States. Through the study of languages and literatures, we find inspiration in diverse ways of imagining and creating a better world, while remaining vigilant to the aestheticization of violence and the many forms of duplicity with which inequity has been reproduced to this day. Racism and other forms of bigotry are still part of our institutions, methods, and ways of thinking. Our department is committed to continue the process of bringing our research and teaching in more just and enriching directions. As educators working on Ho-Chunk lands and experiencing the effects of imperial expansion, we strive to dismantle the legacies of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, to revise our curriculum, and to incorporate new pedagogies, epistemologies, and languages.