Class Schedules

This course explores cross-cultural encounters in the Americas that characterized the meetings of Europeans, Africans, and Americans in the early modern world between 1492 and 1763.  During this period, the Atlantic Ocean and its adjacent land masses became critical locations for economic, biological, and cultural exchanges.  This course focuses on the Americas as sites for discovery, mutual incomprehension, and exploitation.  The course explores the ways that conquest, resistance, and strategic cooperation shaped peoples' "new worlds" on both sides of the Atlantic. It also considers how colonialism framed and was framed by scientific inquiry, religious beliefs, economic thought, and artistic expression.  Students interrogate primary sources-written, visual and aural--that emerged from these encounters and the secondary literatures that have sought to make sense of them.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The Neotropical realm refers to the biogeographic region that includes the tropical terrestrial ecoregions of the Americas and South America's temperate zone. These areas provide a range of services-both locally and globally--including water sources, climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation. They are also home to various human populations and support the livelihood of local and global human populations. This course provides students a basic understanding of the most important biophysical and social characteristics of the dominant landscapes of the Neotropics. Among others, these include tropical rain forests, Andean páramos, tropical dry forests, wetlands, deserts and temperate forests of southern South America. For each of these landscapes, we will analyze the key climatological, biogeographical and ecological processes and also study the peoples that live in them including indigenous communities, afro-descendants, and mestizos. Finally, using examples of these areas, we also analyze human-environment interactions including land change processes, biodiversity, resource and cultural conservation, and climate change impacts.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Comparative study of political institutions and conflicts in several Latin American countries. Through a mix of empirical and theoretical work, we analyze concepts and issues such as authoritarianism and democratization, neoliberalism, state terror and peace processes, guerrilla movements, party systems, populism, the Cuban Revolution, and U.S. military intervention. Themes are explored through diverse teaching methods including discussion, debates, simulations, partisan narratives, lecture, film, and poetry. This class employs an innovative system of qualitative assessment. Students take the course "S/SD/N with Written Evaluation." This provides a powerful opportunity for students to stretch their limits in a learning community with high expectations, but without a high-presure atmosphere. This ungraded course has been approved for inclusion on major/minor/concentration plans in Political Science, Latin American Studies, and Human Rights and Humanitarianism.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course focuses on reproductive health as a human right following the reproductive justice framework. It will focus on women and how they navigate the system to expand their rights. The course will pay particular attention to women who are marginalized due to their race, class, gender identity, indigeneity, and religion. In doing so, this course studies reproductive health and human rights in relation to the broader structural context in the Americas (e.g. national laws and international conventions). As the topic of women's reproductive rights is vast, we will be focusing on abortion, domestic violence, and motherhood. Students in the class will study these issues from the perspective of women's organizations that have mobilized to expand reproductive rights. This course will be comparative in nature as it will focus on reproductive rights in the U.S. and Latin America from the 1980s onwards. These two regions are intimately connected politically and economically, and in regards to reproductive rights. For example, the gag rule introduced by the Reagan administration in 1984 jeopardized the reproductive health services provided in Latin American countries that received funding from the U.S. government. Yet another way that these two regions have been coupled is through feminist networks that have been working to expand reproductive rights in the Americas.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course examines and critically analyzes various approaches to the study of how different individuals and communities in particular historical and cultural scenarios in contemporary Latin America create meanings about their past experience with political violence. The course addresses questions related to the tension between remembering and forgetting, the presence of conflicting memories and truths and how these are negotiated or not through distinct forms of representation. The cultural analysis of different means of representation: human rights and truth commissions’ reports, testimonials, film, art and memorials will be the basis for class discussions on different notions of truth and different forms of truth-telling. A close examination of these forms of representation will reveal the extent to which they can conflict with each other while at the same time feed on each other, creating “effects of truth” and leaving room for secrecy as a mode of truth-telling. Finally, the course will also compel students to think about what consequences the politics of memory in postwar Latin America. The content and discussion in this course will necessarily engage with historical contexts and personal testimonies of violence that include arbitrary arrest and detention, torture, sexual violence, genocide, massacres, extrajudicial execution and disappearances. Much of the material will be emotionally and intellectually challenging to engage with. We will do our best to flag especially graphic or intense content that discusses or represents violence and will do our best to make this classroom a space where we can engage bravely, empathetically and thoughtfully with difficult content every week.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course explores historical and contemporary perspectives on racial and ethnic groups in American society, including African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, European Americans, and Americans of Middle Eastern descent. The goal is to develop an understanding of socio-historical forces that have shaped the lives of racial and ethnic groups in America.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course presents the student with essential tools for the critical analysis of a broad range of topics and forms of cultural production (literature, cinema, art, e-texts, etc.) in the Hispanic world. It also teaches the student advanced language skills in written composition and public oral presentation. This course satisfies the Area 2 requirement for the Spanish major. Prerequisite(s): SPAN 305 or SPAN 306.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course provides an interdisciplinary discussion of the Latinx experience in the United States with a focus on Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban- Americans. Using fiction, poetry, films and critical essays, we will examine issues of race and ethnicity, language, identity, gender and sexuality, politics, and immigration. This course satisfies the Area 2 requirement for the Spanish major. Prerequisite(s): SPAN 305 or SPAN 306

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

How did the Arab Spring and Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement deploy a similar tactical repertoire, yet provoke different outcomes?  Comparing movements for Black lives in Colombia and South Africa, does participant diversity boost or undercut mobilization?  And does mobilization of identity explain how indigenous Bolivians ejected U.S. corporations and scored lasting victories against the white power structure?  This advanced research seminar engages theories that seek to explain the origins and development of movements, including LGBTQ+ movements struggling to avoid deradicalization in Germany, feminist organizations in Nicaragua navigating tensions between autonomy and agenda-setting, mobilization of Brazilian prisoners resisting pandemic lockdowns within lockdowns, and artists making visible the erased contributions of Kenyan women to the global climate justice movement.  Students planning to conduct social movements research while studying away may write a research prospectus to launch that field research project. Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing or permission of instructor.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

A survey of modern dialectal variations of Spanish and Peninsular Spanish varieties. Sociolinguistic issues and historical aspects of language will be addressed, along with other extralinguistic factors. Through this course, students will gain a linguistic understanding of the principal varieties of Modern Spanish. This course satisfies the Area 3 requirement for the Spanish major. Prerequisite(s): SPAN 309 or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course, we will explore oral traditions primarily from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean throughout the Gran Caribe, which includes the islands as well as tierra firme. We will give particular attention to the Spanish poetic form called el romance hispánico, and to West-African griot storytelling and poetry in their myriad articulations throughout the region. Students will engage both oral and musical expressions along with selections from the abundant corpus of theory on voice, orality and performance by Caribbean intellectuals. One goal of the course is to encourage students to identify parallels and differences in how communities have transformed these traditions. Bring your whole self to this course, and tap into your storytelling capacities, your poetic voice and your musicality. This course satisfies the Area 2 requirement for the Spanish major. Prerequisite SPAN 305 and ideally another Spanish course at the 300 level.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism OR U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Long before the advent of television and other screen media, theater and dramatic performances were a means of presenting and debating the pressing socio-historical issues of the day through the vehicle of fiction. They were also an instrument for religious and political propaganda to create and maintain social cohesion, and even justify the very existence of social values, political authority, colonization, and social hierarchies (i.e. subjugation). In this course, we will study a selection of dramatic performances and theatrical plays written about Latin America on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Our selected list of works includes texts produced by indigenous communities before the arrival of Columbus (1492) as well as theatrical plays written by Latin American and Spanish playwrights during the first two hundred years of the colonial domination in Latin America (15th and 16th centuries), also known as Spain’s Golden Age. This course satisfies the Area 1 requirement for the Spanish major. Prerequisite(s): SPAN 307 or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course focuses on the writing of black women writers from Brazil. We will study the history of race relations in Brazil as the framework of the struggle of Afro-Brazilian women against invisibility and injustice. We will analyze a wide array of texts, which revolve around the experiences and the position Black women have traditionally had within Brazilian society and the way they are now contesting such circumstances and roles through literature, music, art, theater, folklore, Afro-Brazilian religion, and cinema. Students will learn about "escrevivência", the process of writing the experience of the marginalized and the oppressed. Prerequisite(s): PORT 331

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

From the sixteenth century to the twenty-first century, the Amazon rainforest has been a source of wonderment, greed, and, in our present, concern. However, as exemplified by metaphors such as “el Dorado”, the “Green Hell” or the “Lungs of the Earth”, the Amazon is as much a geographical space as it is a discursive formation. This course offers an introduction to the cultural representations of the Amazon rainforest. From Indigenous myths to contemporary films and first-person accounts, we will analyze how the Amazon has been imagined and depicted by multiple actors, such as indigenous activists, scientists, filmmakers, and entrepreneurs. Through a variety of texts, disciplines, and voices, we will analyze how the Amazon has been narrated as a place of “origin”, “wealth”, “suffering”, and “resistance”. While students will gain a general understanding of Amazonian culture, one of the objectives of the course is to discuss how indigenous peoples are tapping into their ancestral knowledge to situate themselves as global political actors and fight back against environmental degradation. This course satisfies the Area 2 requirement of the Spanish major. Prerequisite: SPAN 307 or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course offers a general survey of the complex and heterogeneous region we somewhat reductively term Latin America. It follows a roughly chronological approach, beginning with the eve of encounter and continuing through the contemporary era. Discussions will consider themes such as the institution and legacy of colonialism, the search for new national identities, and the onset of modern racial and political strife. The course will emphasize the import of global economic, political, and cultural trends on the formation of the region.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

According to the International Organization for Migration (OIM), in 2019, the United States had the largest foreign-born population in the world. During the same year, immigrants represented 15% of the United States population while 53% of the foreign-born migrants came from Latin America. At the same time, we are observing the securitization of the US-Mexico border that is resulting in the removal of undocumented individuals from the U.S. in large numbers, specifically Latino men. The course examines recent U.S. immigration as part of a global (historical) phenomenon to understand how we got to where we are. While we will become familiar with immigration policies, we will pay attention to the experiences of immigrants, particularly those coming from Latin America. We will explore questions such as: What motivates people to migrate? How does migration reconfigure social relations, such as parental and community relations? This is a discussion-based course and includes guest speakers and a civic engagement project with a local organization.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course seeks to provide an overview of politics in Latin America, examining the formation of the region's political institutions. The course begins by learning about the evolution of political institutions during the 1930s and 1940s, influenced by industrialization and populism, which laid the groundwork for military dictatorships. We will explore how many of these regimes decline and regional democratic transition. In the second half of the course, we'll analyze how countries across the region have adapted to contemporary challenges, such as identity politics, criminal violence, and economic inequality. The course will blend lectures and student-led discussions, exploring the work of academics, musicians, and authors who have contributed to our understanding of the region.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course presents the student with essential tools for the critical analysis of a broad range of topics and forms of cultural production (literature, cinema, art, e-texts, etc.) in the Hispanic world. It also teaches the student advanced language skills in written composition and public oral presentation. This course satisfies the Area 2 requirement for the Spanish major. Prerequisite(s): SPAN 305 or SPAN 306.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course provides an interdisciplinary discussion of the Latinx experience in the United States with a focus on Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban- Americans. Using fiction, poetry, films and critical essays, we will examine issues of race and ethnicity, language, identity, gender and sexuality, politics, and immigration. This course satisfies the Area 2 requirement for the Spanish major. Prerequisite(s): SPAN 305 or SPAN 306

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Europeans were by no means the first peoples to explore new territories and human populations. Renaissance scientific methodology, however, led European travelers to meticulously document each New World encounter in writing and develop new tools with which to navigate and represent space, devices that subsequently became weapons of colonial domination. But as Nature and indigenous populations refused to be subjected to European epistemology, failure and disaster were frequent events: shipwrecks left Old World survivors stranded among unknown lands and peoples in the Americas; Amerindians rejected the imposition of a foreign culture and religion, murdering colonists and missionaries; Africans rebelled against slavery and escaped to mountains and jungles to form autonomous communities. An examination of maps, exploration logs, missionary histories, travel literature, historiography and colonial documents will provide the foundation for this course on the ambivalent reality of the Old World's encounter with the Americas, in which Europeans were often the losers. This course satisfies the Area 1 requirement for the Spanish major. Prerequisite(s): SPAN 305 (though SPAN 307 recommended) and another 300-level Spanish course, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Explorations of the relationship between women and violence typically take place from the perspective of women as victims. However, how does the discourse change when the traditional paradigm is inverted and we explore women as perpetrators of violence? This seminar examines representations of women who kill in Latin American and Latino narratives (including novels, short stories, films, and newspapers). Drawing on feminist theory, media studies, criminology, and literary criticism, we will seek to understand the ways women's violence has been read and framed in contemporary society as well as how their violence intersects with discussions of nationalism, race, class, and gender. This course satisfies the Area 2 requirement for the Spanish major. Prerequisite(s): SPAN 307 or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This seminar considers the interaction between visual culture and the establishment of global empires. It will include examples from the early modern and modern era, beginning with the establishment of European colonization of the Americas and parts of Asia in the 16th century and continuing through semicolonial projects of the 20th century. The course will focus on the interaction between visual representation of empire and the constitution of empire building. The course will follow a broadly chronological focus but will be organized thematically according to forms of visualizing imperial constructions of such topics as racial difference, scientific and technological development, landscape and environmental determinism, and the broader cult to rationality that undergirds the project of "modernity". Students will work with primary and secondary materials to develop original research projects. Counts toward the Global/Comparative, Race and Indigeneity, and Colonization/Empire fields in the History major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The word crônica in Portuguese does not have the same meaning as chronicle, its English equivalent. In Brazil, a crônica is a “short composition, often humorous in tone, that may at times resemble a short story or an essay or that may be a commentary on almost any subject.” In this course, students will improve their proficiency in Portuguese in the four language skills –listening, speaking, reading, and writing– and also gain a deeper cultural knowledge on contemporary Brazil through the discussion of a selection of crônicas. We will analyze these short texts written by famous Brazilian authors (published in the 1970s, 1990s, or 2010s) that will provide us with opportunities to learn more about historical and current Brazilian cultural environments.Prerequisite: PORT 221 or permission of the instructor

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

An integrative, research-oriented capstone which gathers senior majors of diverse regional and disciplinary focuses during the final semester. A faculty convener will integrate a schedule of issue-area seminars, faculty methods and topics presentations, talks by visiting speakers, and student reports on research projects. The course culminates in a lengthy final paper.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials