Portuguese (PORTUG)

Terms offered: Fall 2022, Spring 2022, Fall 2021
The Freshman Seminar Program has been designed to provide new students with the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member in a small-seminar setting. Freshman Seminars are offered in all campus departments, and topics vary from department to department and semester to semester.
Freshman Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2021
This course offers an overview of contemporary Portuguese-Speaking Cultures and Literatures. The time frame covered is from the sixties--years of rupture and experimentalism in artistic and cultural production—to the present. Students will study the concrete poetry of the Portuguese author Ana Hatherly, the visual (“Concrete”) poems of the Brazilian author Haroldo de Campos, and the drawings of the Swiss-Brazilian artist Maria Schendel. The course content will include the multi-layered music of the Angolan duet Ouro Negro and the political essays of Cape Verdean academic Amílcar Cabral. Themes such as colonization, decolonization, freedom, will be among the larger, decidedly compelling group of subjects on which the course will touch.
Introduction to Portugal, Brazil, and other Portuguese-Speaking Cultures (in English): Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
An intensive course for students who have no previous study of Portuguese designed to introduce the basics of the language. This offering prepares the student for upper division course work in Portuguese.
Intensive Portuguese for Spanish Speakers: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
The main objective of this course is to provide ample opportunities for students to improve their oral fluency in Portuguese, through daily conversations on a variety of topics relating to the Lusophone world. Students will also direct and guide two discussions (conversations) during the semester, on topics of their choosing. For these presentations, they will prepare a list of vocabulary as well as discussion questions to stimulate class participation and conversation. Consequently, students will expand their vocabulary and use of idiomatic expressions, review certain grammar structures, and garner a deeper understanding of the differences between colloquial and formal Brazilian Portuguese.
Conversations in Portuguese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
Advanced work in Portuguese grammatical structures. Practice in writing.
Advanced Grammar and Composition: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
In exploring the persistence of a history of conquest and exchange in Brazil, this course investigates the interconnections and cross-fertilizations that have endured to diversify this country’s distinctly original national cultures. In so doing, it uses the impacts of European colonialism in the Americas and Africa as a springboard for understanding Brazil’s regional specificity. While there will be moments that recall a distant past, others will shed light on a present that both resembles and stands apart from much of Spanish America in the present. Throughout the course, the literature that we will be examining will find echoes in the country’s rich history.
Brazil in the World: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2020
This course is a survey of modern and contemporary literature and culture from the Portuguese-speaking world. Drawing on fiction, poetry, film, and visual art, we will explore cultural production throughout the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Students will study and discuss some of the most relevant issues explored in Lusophone literature, such as empire, memory, modernity, and social and economic justice, as well as consider a wide array of artistic production and aesthetic movements, including modernismo, social realism, the avant-garde and postmodernism. The course also offers students a chance to improve their Portuguese reading, writing and speaking skills.
Introduction to Portuguese Literature and Culture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
Spotlight on diverse media (film, radio photography, music, etc.) and selected texts as a way into the history and culture of Brazil. May include early experiments with photography, political uses of radio to reach the masses, the birth of the nation’s film industry and the rise of popular music as they invite readings together with literature. The course allows students to watch, listen and read these materials as a way of exploring emerging social movements, counter-cultural currents and historical paradigm shifts. Students will learn about the major Brazilian cultural and literary movements while becoming familiar with ways of reading cultural materials across different media.
Brazilian Culture Through and Across the Arts and Media: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2020
This course offers a panoramic view of Brazilian culture and history through lyric traditions and counter-traditions. Our focus will be Brazilian poems (including song lyrics) from the 19th century to the present, but we will also examine colonial and baroque texts and how they resonate with modern, mid-century and post-dictatorship literary materials. Moving through key poetic movements from simbolismo to Poesia Marginal, we will examine why the lyric has been a chosen medium for authors to conceptualize identity, difference, ethics, politics and aesthetics. Course conducted in Portuguese. No previous background in poetry or Brazilian literature required.
The Brazilian Lyric: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2022 First 6 Week Session
This course provides a panoramic view of Portuguese Literature and Azorean literature and Culture via the study of emblematic works of Portuguese ana Azorean literature and culture. Readings, lectures, and discussion will be conducted in English. Students may opt to write their papers in either Portuguese or English. Portuguese Majors and Minors, must submit their work in Portuguese.
Survey of Portuguese and Azorean Literature and Culture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Fall 2021
Reflects on some of the leading writers, artists, and thinkers from the Republic (1889) to the present and the social and political transformations of modern and contemporary Brazil that shaped literary and artistic production. In providing students with an introduction to major literary movements (modernism, regionalism, concretism, marginal literature, urban literature, etc), the course problematizes the idea of a literary canon while exploring lesser-known works and newer voices. Histories of Brazil’s social transformations, as well as theoretical reflections on the politics of world literature and translation, form part of this course’s offerings.
Modern and Contemporary Brazilian Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Spring 2022
Study of literature and cultural texts representative of classical literary genres: narrative prose, plays and poetry.
Studies in Luso-Brazilian Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Fall 2015, Spring 2015
Directed study centering on the preparation/completion of an honors thesis (see Honors Program, Option B, above).
Portuguese Honors Course: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2016, Spring 2016, Spring 2015

Supervised Independent Study and Research: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023

Critical and Stylistic Studies of a Single Author or Period: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023
Individual conferences on special programs of study or research in a restricted field not covered by available courses or seminars.
Special Study for Graduate Students: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023

Special Advanced Study: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2015
This course provides participants with an understanding of the teaching methods used in Portuguese 101A at UCB, a forum for discussing teaching-related questions and problems, practical experience in creating and adapting materials for instruction, and experience in analyzing one’s own and other’s teaching. It is a hands on practicum that links the theory of the Portuguese language program to its in-class practice. At the end of the course, students will be prepared with strategies for effective teaching and classroom management. Students will be able to create communicative and task based activities. They will be able to develop effective exams and assessments, and be familiar with the use of classroom technology for language teaching.
Teaching Portuguese at Berkeley: Read More [+]