Literary studies. The Department of Romance Studies and Classics covers the full temporal range of written Spanish, from the thirteenth century to the present day; looking at medieval Spanish texts for indications of how different variants of the Spanish language have developed over time and how the dialect of Castile became the “standard language”, steadily replacing Aragonese and Galician (see below, Spanish philology); the study of the Baroque as a particularly effervescent literary style, in both the Early Modern and Modern periods; Latin American literature and culture from the conquest to the 21st century; Native American literature from an ecocritical and symbolic perspective; ecocriticism, eco-culture and environmental humanities as disciplines whose focus lies in how fiction treats landscape and environment; research on memory studies, literature and globalization, in particular relation to the social experience of trauma.
With regard to linguistics, a particular strength is the study of pragmatic aspects of the language, that is, how linguistic and cultural behaviour is embedded in socio-cultural frameworks (such as analysis of expressions of (im)politeness); another is the investigation of grammatical variation in Spanish with particular emphasis on dialectal and social variation; and, further, research on second language learning and Spanish as second language (see also Spanish linguistics).
