Department of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese & LAS, University of Toronto

Department of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese & LAS, University of Toronto A vibrant community exploring the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American languages, cultures, histories and their diasporas. Join us!

Expanded programs, research opportunities, and connections that cross borders.

Join us in welcoming Dr. Irene Villa, a new Postdoctoral Fellow at ISPLAS, whose research explores the history and ongoi...
08/31/2026

Join us in welcoming Dr. Irene Villa, a new Postdoctoral Fellow at ISPLAS, whose research explores the history and ongoing significance of debates around gender, sexuality and feminism.

Dr. Villa examines feminist movements, q***r politics and sexuality studies, challenging long-held assumptions about Italian feminism while uncovering voices and debates that have often remained at the margins of dominant narratives.

Her current research project, The Italian Feminist S*x Wars, revisits the political and intellectual conflicts of the 1990s, exploring how competing understandings of feminism, sexuality, and le***an politics emerged and developed during this decade. She is also co-editing a volume, Who’s Afraid of Gender in Italy?, which explores contemporary anti-gender politics in Italy while recovering q***r genealogies of resistance.

How can looking at the past help us better understand today’s conversations about gender, identity and social change?

Stay tuned—we’ll soon share more about Irene’s research and the questions driving her work.

*xualityStudies

Are you still looking for a course to add to your Fall schedule?Ever wondered what your star sign says about your academ...
08/28/2026

Are you still looking for a course to add to your Fall schedule?

Ever wondered what your star sign says about your academic options? 🔮📚

Swipe through to find the ISPLAS course that might just be written in the stars for you. From Aries energy to Pisces creativity, there’s a course match for every cosmic personality. 🌟

We are pleased to welcome Professor Elaine Grolla from the University of São Paulo (USP), who has joined ISPLAS as a vis...
08/28/2026

We are pleased to welcome Professor Elaine Grolla from the University of São Paulo (USP), who has joined ISPLAS as a visiting professor until July 14, 2027.

Professor Grolla is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at USP and a leading scholar in Portuguese linguistics, with research focusing on child language acquisition and the syntax of child language in Portuguese and other languages.

During her visit to the University of Toronto, Professor Grolla will continue her research on children’s production of Wh-questions and relative clauses, while developing experimental research on the relationship between children’s language development, inhibition control and working memory.

Her research explores how children’s sentence production is shaped by both their developing grammar and their executive functions. By looking at how working memory and inhibitory control interact with linguistic knowledge, she seeks to better understand how children process complex structures and how language unfolds during development.

We look forward to welcoming Professor Grolla to ISPLAS and to the many opportunities for research and collaboration her visit will bring to our community!

🌿🛢️ How did oil become part of the way we imagine, produce, and consume the world around us?Join us for a fascinating ta...
08/28/2026

🌿🛢️ How did oil become part of the way we imagine, produce, and consume the world around us?

Join us for a fascinating talk by Prof. Emily Hind exploring the relationship between plants, oil, film, and consumption in two Mexican works from the 1930s.

“Plants on Oil: The Process Story in Petróleo ¡la sangre del mundo! (1936) and the Consumption Model in Los millones de Chaflán (1938)”

🗓️ Friday, September 18
🕑 2:00 to 4:00 p.m.
📍VC101

How did we come to saturate our plants with myriad forms of oil? This talk looks at a documentary from 1936, produced for Mexican audiences by foreign oil companies, with photography by Gabriel Figueroa, which aims to court favor for oil culture—or, better put—plants on oil culture. After all, humans cannot live on oil alone; we must have plants. To understand the elisions in the process story of oil extraction, the talk also examines the feature film “Los millones de Chaflán”(1938), which invites the audience to laugh at the bumpkin or jay role and to suppose that even rural rubes embrace the logic of combining plants and oil. As we examine the curtailed logic in these parallel process narratives and consumption proposals, we will consider how the ideas are foundational.

Emily Hind is a Professor of Spanish at the University of Florida, where she was voted Professor of the Year four times by graduate students in the Hispanic literature program. Hind’s “Dude Lit” (2019) received honorable mention for Best Book in the Humanities 2019 from the Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association. She translated “Macholiteratura” (2025). Her third book of interviews (2020) gathers 22 conversations with writers and editors of children’s and young adult literature in Mexico. She is currently working on a book for Vanderbilt University Press, “Plants on Oil in Mexican Texts”, 1936–2021.

We hope you can join us for this thought-provoking exploration of oil, plants, cinema, and Mexican cultural history!

We’re delighted to welcome Joshua Arthurs as Associate Professor, jointly appointed to ISPLAS and the Faculty of Informa...
08/27/2026

We’re delighted to welcome Joshua Arthurs as Associate Professor, jointly appointed to ISPLAS and the Faculty of Information!

This year, Prof. Arthurs will be teaching “Italian Fascism and Global Responses: The Dark Side of Italianità”, a course that explores the political, social, and cultural history of Italian Fascism—and its global impact. From political violence and propaganda to everyday life, resistance, racism, imperialism, and antisemitism, students will examine Fascism not only as a historical movement, but also in relation to the questions it raises for our own time.

Prof. Arthurs’ research brings together history, cultural heritage, public memory, and everyday life under dictatorship. His work asks important questions about how societies remember difficult pasts, how monuments and museums shape collective identities, and what ordinary people’s experiences can tell us about life under authoritarian regimes.

He is also the author of the forthcoming book “Forty-Five Days: The Fall of Mussolini and Italy’s Reckoning with Fascism”, which examines the intense period following Mussolini’s fall in July 1943. By focusing on those 45 days, the book explores how Italians experienced regime change—and how that moment shaped debates about Fascism and national memory that continue to resonate today.

We look forward to learning more about his research and teaching!

Welcome to ISPLAS, Prof. Arthurs!

What did consumption, leisure and social spaces have to do with imagining modernity in post-Franco Spain? 🇪🇸Join us for ...
08/26/2026

What did consumption, leisure and social spaces have to do with imagining modernity in post-Franco Spain? 🇪🇸

Join us for “Consumir la modernidad: espacios y prácticas de la gauche divine en la España postfranquista,” a talk by Dr. Sofía González Gómez (Universidad de Alcalá).

Through novels and testimonies by women writers connected to Barcelona’s gauche divine, including Esther Tusquets and Ana María Moix, Dr. González Gómez explores how places and practices such as Costa Brava beaches, spas, bingo, fashion and leisure became ways of experiencing and imagining modernity during Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy.

📚 Dr. González Gómez is a Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Universidad de Alcalá whose work focuses on Spanish cultural history, the press and the publishing market in processes of cultural modernization.

📖 Her latest book, “Deseo de ser libres. Literatura, sociedad y movimiento estudiantil”(1956–1975), was published by Comares in 2026.

🗓️ September 22
🕗 4:00 p.m.
📍 Northrop Frye Centre, VC102 - 73 Queen’s Park Cresc E.

This talk is sponsored by the Ramón y Cajal Programme, with special thanks to the Northrop Frye Centre.

Organized by Prof. Bob Davidson (ISPLAS).

If you are enrolling in a Spanish course for the very first time in the upcoming academic year, listen up!Be sure to com...
08/21/2026

If you are enrolling in a Spanish course for the very first time in the upcoming academic year, listen up!

Be sure to complete our mandatory placement test before you add your course to ACORN or place yourself in the waiting list to make sure you are enrolling in the appropriate level.

Our placement test period ends on Thursday, September 18 and is all done remotely. Visit our website for more information:https://www.spanport.utoronto.ca/undergraduate or use the link in our bio.

Swipe for some of the FAQs, including what to expect for this process, who should complete it and more!

The first monthly COMUNAL Writing Group meeting will take place on September 23 at 5:00 p.m. in the Nexus Lounge (12th f...
08/17/2026

The first monthly COMUNAL Writing Group meeting will take place on September 23 at 5:00 p.m. in the Nexus Lounge (12th floor, OISE building).

The COMUNAL Writing Group serves as a space for convening, informal peer mentorship, and writing. The structure is quite flexible, and students are encouraged to drop in whenever they can.

They plan to provide food, followed by brief introductions at each session, setting writing goals, and then dedicating the majority of the time to writing. There will be informal mentorship from a Latine professor, but the focus will be on peer and community support.

The goal is to create a (counter)space to support Latin American students (both undergraduate and graduate) in their writing and research, contributing to the development of a stronger community at the University of Toronto. This will hopefully inspire members’ aspirations (“How can I become a grad student?” “How can I improve my academic writing?”) and help them envision their goals.

Interested in joining the COMUNAL Writing Group? Visit COMUNAL Writing Group on Instagram and fill out the interest form through the link in their bio.

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