Department News
Congratulations to Katherine Ward – 2025 CGS/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Humanities and Arts!
The Graduate School has selected Katherine Ward’s dissertation as the UW–Madison nominee for the 2025 CGS/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Humanities and Arts. The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS), jointly with ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, …
Professor Paola Hernández Awarded Kellett Mid-Career Award
Congratulations to Mellon-Morgridge Professor Paola Hernández for being awarded the Kellett Mid-Career Award!! With this award the University recognizes Mellon-Morgridge Professor Hernández’s academic success and provides her an opportunity for continued development of her outstanding …
Congratulations to Andrés Correal – Spring 2025 Pedagogical Innovation Winner!
Please join the Department of Spanish & Portuguese in congratulating Andrés Correal, winner of the Spring 2025 Pedagogical Innovation Contest! Contestants submitted a detailed proposal involving the incorporation of artificial intelligence into an existing lower-division …
Congratulations to our 2025 Marsha Gray Ehrlich Scholarship Fund Recipients
The Department of Spanish & Portuguese is delighted to announce this year’s Marsha Gray Ehrlich Scholarship Fund recipients. Marsha Gray Ehrlich was a former graduate student in our Department, and an inspirational teacher during her …
Undergraduate Anna Schiessl Awarded FLAS Fellowship
Please join the Department of Spanish & Portuguese in congratulating undergraduate Spanish major Anna Schiessl on her Foreign Language & Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship. FLAS fellowships assist students in the acquisition of foreign language and …
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Events
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La mesa de conversación
The Department of Spanish and Portugues organizes an informal Spanish language conversation table for all Spanish speakers, native and non-native, which will be held Tuesdays during the academic semester from 5 PM to 7PM in the Sett (second floor) of the Union South. Find us on the UW Events Calendar!
Spanish & Portuguese Newsletter
The Department of Spanish & Portuguese Statement on Diversity, Inclusion, and Anti-Racism
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.