Charting New Waters: Teaching Ephemeral Spanish Drama

Abstract

Abstract:This article chronicles our collaborative experience designing and teaching “Ephemeral Spanish Drama,” a fourth-year undergraduate course taught in Spanish at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in 2025. The class, unprecedented in its focus on comedias sueltas, proved compelling, even for enrolled students who were overwhelmingly pursuing STEM majors (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). While identifying areas for refinement in the future, we attribute the course’s appeal to key pedagogical features we describe, including the use of complementary primary sources from JHU’s Special Collections Library, evaluation based on creative capstone projects, and hands-on classroom activities using the library’s substantial collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sueltas. More fundamentally, we suggest that the genre itself is inherently well suited to the twenty-first-century classroom. The dearth of published scholarship on sueltas, when coupled with a flipped-classroom approach, enhanced student learning outcomes by encouraging speculative inquiry and mitigating reliance on online resources and artificial intelligence. Theatrical ephemera—accessible worldwide through open access digital archives—thus demonstrate the distinctive power of hands-on, materially grounded learning in the humanities classroom.