Facilities
The Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature is housed in the Frank Melville Jr., Memorial Library, which puts students right in the heart of the major research resources of the University.
Language and Learning Research Center
The Language Learning and Research Center (LLRC) is a state-of-the-art facility devoted to language acquisition in its broadest sense and research on language acquisition. For the LLRC, this means supporting work in literature and culture as well as language, since literature and culture are vitally linked, as content areas, with language itself. The LLRC has hosted research in a variety of languages and fields, from applied linguistics and TESOL to Japanese linguistics, Russian literature, and Spanish technological learning aids. It serves as the focus for Stony Brook's Doctor of Arts in Foreign Language Teaching Program and as well as for research in the Ph.D. in Linguistics Program.
The Center contains several use areas. It has a 34-position audio and video laboratory, a 36-position computer laboratory, a new 20-position computer teaching classroom, and two 60-seat multimedia “smart” classrooms as well as a materials development area. It contains technological materials for all of the languages, literatures, and cultures taught at Stony Brook, and is particularly rich in instructional CD-ROMs and laserdiscs. In fact, it houses the entire University laserdisc collection, which can be used in the Center's laserdisc players. The Center can duplicate audiotapes, convert videotapes from one standard to another, and can make videotapes, minidiscs, and CD-ROMs.
Under the aegis of its Director, Mikle D. Ledgerwood, the Center offers courses on both the undergraduate and graduate levels on the intersection between language learning and technology, and hosts both presentations and workshops in this area. It has a broad outreach mission regionally, nationally, and internationally.
Library Collection
The Spanish language and Spanish and Latin American literatures collection at the Stony Brook University Library comprises approximately 60,000 volumes. The collection is growing at the rate of approximately 1,400 volumes annually. Together with its interlibrary loan service, the University Library more than adequately supports the Ph.D. program offered by the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature.
The collection contains quantities of scarce or unique items of extreme value for research purposes, some of which, owing to their rarity, are housed in the Library's Department of Special Collections. Examples include: the Amunategui Collection, which is from the early 19th century and contains rare books, dramatic works, and materials, including publications from the Revolutionary Presses of 1891 and 1925 through 1931; and the Columbine, a private collection from Argentina , consisting of 2,000 volumes on Columbus , the discovery of America , and Americus Vespucius. The Biblioteca Natan from Mexico is particularly strong on literature and criticism of the early 20th century and has many unusual items from the Caribbean in its 3,800 volumes. The Neruda Collection, rare editions of the Nobel Laureate Chilean poet, includes translations of his works into at least eight languages. The Delta Collection from Uruguay consists of over 9,000 items primarily from Argentina and Uruguay .
There is a strong collaboration between the Library and the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature. Individual faculty and graduate students are promptly informed of recent acquisitions concerning their fields of research. The Library also is very responsive to requests for acquisitions.
The faculty of the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature are dedicated mentors and teachers. They also are fine scholars and researchers, recognized for their scholarship and research by learning institutions around the world. Faculty interests cover all aspects of the Hispanic culture from literature and linguistics to visual culture and film. Major methodological approaches to cultural analysis are fully represented within the department. They include: philology, poetics, cultural studies, Marxism, feminism, colonialism, and postmodernism. The department co-sponsors the publication of La Perinola: Revista de Investigación Quevediana, one of the most important journals on Spanish literature of the Golden Age.
Faculty publications regularly appear in such leading journals as Journal of Latin American Studies, Hispamérica, Revista Iberoamericana, Modern Language Notes, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Siglo XX/20th Century, Anales Galdosianos, Film Quarterly, Annali, Sezione Romanza, Bulletin Hispanique, Revista Hispánica, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Archivum Linguisticum, and La Torre. These publications demonstrate the interests and the involvement of the faculty in the development of new perspectives.
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