Vested Interests: the Place of Spanish in Australian Academia

Authors

  • Alfredo Martínez-Expósito

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1344/co20141374-86

Keywords:

Spanish in Australia, Teaching of Spanish, Discipline of Spanish

Abstract

The history of Spanish departments in Australian universities can be traced back to the 1960s, when a number of British hispanistas relocated to Australia and created a small number of successful teaching programs that reproduced the British model. A second generation of Spanish scholars arrived in the 1980s and 1990s, mainly from Latin American countries, in a migration wave that is still current. The transition from a British understanding of the Spanish discipline, with a strong focus on (canonical) literary studies, to current curricula that emphasise communicative skills and a loose notion of cultural studies, is symptomatic of deeper changes in the way the discipline has sought to reposition itself in the context of the Modern Languages debate.

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