Brief History

The study of Spanish and Portuguese at Tulane University has a long and distinguished history. The university contracted its first professor of Spanish in 1853 when the entire faculty consisted of only nine members. When the Newcomb College for Women was founded in 1887, one of the original seven faculty members was a professor of Spanish. By the early 1920s, both the women’s and the men’s colleges (Newcomb and Arts & Sciences, respectively) had established departments of Spanish as distinct from the other Romance Languages. In 1928 the first M.A. in Spanish was awarded at Tulane University. The Ph.D. program was established in 1947, the same year that the Portuguese language was first offered. In 1950, Tulane University awarded its first Ph.D. in Spanish. From the beginning of the Ph.D. program, faculty and graduate students have pursued research interests in both Peninsularist and Latin Americanist fields. The development of graduate study in Spanish and Portuguese coincided with the rise of Latin American Studies at Tulane which began awarding advanced degrees in the late 1940s. Since then, the department has maintained mutually beneficial relations with this acclaimed interdisciplinary center at Tulane University.

Newcomb Hall