This course will explore the major issues that have shaped the Caribbean since 1791, including: colonialism and revolution, slavery and abolition, migration and diaspora, economic inequality, and racial hierarchy. We will examine the Caribbean through a comparative approach--thinking across national and linguistic boundaries--with a focus on Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. While our readings and discussions will foreground the islands of the Greater Antilles, we will also consider relevant examples from the circum-Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora as points of comparison.

This seminar investigates the historical experiences of women in the Caribbean from the era of European conquest to the late twentieth century. We will examine how shifting conceptions of gender, sexuality, race, class, and the body have shaped understandings of womanhood and women's rights. We will engage a variety of sources - including archival documents, films, newspaper accounts, feminist blogs, music, and literary works - in addition to historical scholarship and theoretical texts. The course will include readings on the Spanish-, English-, and French-speaking Caribbean as well as the Caribbean diaspora.

This class offers an overview of the history, pharmacology, cultural uses and changing attitudes about psychedelic and other psychoactive substances around the world. After introducing the field of ethnobotany and its role in drug 'discovery' the course surveys shamanism from various perspectives: transcultural psychiatry, altered states of consciousness, New Age spirituality and the science of 'plant intelligence.' Readings investigate the legal and scientific repercussions of the 'psychedelic revolution,' while providing a critical assessment of questions around criminalization, commodification and appropriations of Indigenous knowledge.

The course focuses on the social forces that shape design thinking. Its objective is to introduce architectural and urban design issues to build design and critical thinking skills from a multidisciplinary perspective. The studio is team-taught from faculty across disciplines to expose students to the multiple forces within which design operates.

What is anti-colonial art? What Latin American artworks reflect the lasting impacts of colonialism? The cultural geographies of "Latin America" show there are no simple answers. Anti-colonial studies reveal that coloniality affects all aspects of life - subjectivity, race, gender, sexuality, language, and knowledge. This course examines artistic practices and their challenge to coloniality's ongoing effects. By exploring materials such as literary texts, visual artworks, and performances, students will engage in critical debates and develop methodological skills to analyze Latin America's cultural histories from the 1960s to the present.

This course studies artistic and cultural practices that created different aesthetics and politics of memory that have become essential to respond, denounce, and creatively resist to different forms of violence and human rights violations. Looking at essays, literature, visual arts, and sites of memory, the course will analyze how cultural works on memory and human rights have helped to create connections between past and present histories of both violence and resistance. Although the course focuses on Latin America, it will also look at forms of cultural transfer among memory practices from different parts of the world.

This course focuses on how the renewed analysis of a relationality among different violences generated by popular feminisms impact our understanding of justice and accountability. Taking the crossings between social reproduction and prison abolition, personal and systemic violences as critical horizons, we explore different practices and regimes of signification posed in pamphlets, philosophical, literary, and artistic works. Although the course focuses on Latin America, it includes key works by feminists from the U.S. and analyzes processes of translation currently taking place. Readings available in Spanish and English.

Tropical Biology 338 is an intensive three-week field course based in lowland rainforest in Panama. The origins, maintenance, and major interactions of terrestrial biota in tropical rainforests will be examined. The course will involve travel to three different field sites, field journaling, and completion of independent field based research projects.

An examination of the literature of the francophone Caribbean from the Haitian Revolution to the postcolonial present. The course focuses on the original critiques of slavery, racism, and colonialism that this literature has invented. Authors will include Toussaint, Louverture, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, CLR James, and Maryse Condé.

Cuba was one of the first New World colonies of Europe yet among the last to sever the colonial bond. The island was among the last places in the hemisphere to abolish slavery, yet home to the first black political party in the Americas. After the revolution of 1959, among the most radical of the modern world, it became an important international symbol of third world socialism and anti-imperialism, and an unexpected focus of global Cold War struggles. This course serves as an introduction to that fascinating history and to the major themes that have shaped it: race and slavery; nationalism and empire; revolution and socialism.

This course explores Latin America's history from independence to the present. We examine the contentious process of building national polities and economies in a world of expansionist foreign powers. The region's move towards greater legal equality in the 19th century coexisted with social hierarchies related to class, race, gender, and place of origin. We explore how this tension generated stronger, even revolutionary demands for change in the 20th century, while considering how growing U.S. power shaped possibilities for regional transformation. Primary sources foreground the perspectives of elites, subalterns, artists and intellectuals.

History 306 studies all Latinos in the US, from those who have (im)migrated from across Latin America to those who lived in what became US lands. The course covers the historical origins of debates over land ownership, the border, assimilation expectations, discrimination, immigration regulation, intergroup differences, civil rights activism, and labor disputes. History 306 looks transnationally at Latin America's history by exploring shifts in US public opinion and domestic policies. By the end of the course, students will have a greater understanding and appreciation of how Latinos became an identifiable group in the US.

From a relatively poor, multi-religious, and politically-fragmented land during the Middle Ages, Spain became in the early modern period one of the biggest empires in world history. This introductory course offers a historical overview of the Spanish empire, from its emergence in the late fifteenth century to its eventual dissolution in the nineteenth century. We will examine the nature of Spanish imperial rule, the societies and cultures that were forged in the process, and the asymmetric connections that it facilitated between Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

In Latin America, the extraction of silver, dyes, cash crops (sugar, bananas, wheat), guano, petroleum, and more broadly water, soil, energy, and human labor embedded in goods from the 15th to the 21st centuries fed the rise of capitalism and its imperialist expansion. This impacted environments and human relationships with and within them throughout the continent. The seminar analyzes such impacts through the environmental history of subsistence agriculture, monoculture, deforestation, the control and degradation of water and soil, mining, urban pollution, conservationism, climate change, "sustainable development", and activism.

Course examines the history of Latin America and the Caribbean since independence, paying particular attention to relations with the United States.

This introductory course examines what it means to be Latinx in the United States. We explore Latinx identity through an analysis of history, social processes, and gender. We analyze how processes of racialization are connected to class, gender, and sexuality, as well as other identity markers. This course studies experiences and events through cultural texts comprising verbal and non-verbal communication and representation and analyzes how Latinx communities negotiate empire, identity, language, and notions of home.

As authoritarianism spreads across America, this course offers a feminist reading of authoritarian politics in Central America--centered on its everyday forms of racism, sexism, and classism intensified under neoliberal politics. From an ethnographic perspective, this course excavates the intersectional memories of authoritarianism, democratic disenchantments, and radical pessimism. Then, it discusses the fascist cooptation of family, bodies, and labor, the political ecologies of authoritarianism, and the feminist forms of activism under authoritarianism.

Has travel ever been so easy-and so difficult? Who has the right to move freely, and why? This interdisciplinary course explores the paradoxes of globalization, where mobility is promoted while borders are reinforced. Through the study of literature, political theory, and art, from twentieth-century and contemporary Latin American writers and artists, we will examine how globalization both encourages and constrains movement. We will develop critical tools for reflecting on our own relationship with travel while understanding the broader dynamics of globalization-the movement it enables, the subjectivities it creates, and the spaces it shapes.

We will explore the rich and diverse rhythms, music, and dance traditions of the African Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean. Reading materials, videos, and audio samples will be used to introduce aspects of people's lives, music, dance, rhythms, drums, and religious practices in these regions, and to provide a true knowledge and authentic cultural experience. Each topic will be followed by an in-class Practicum, where students demonstrate their understanding through the discussion and presentation of original work. This course is open to musicians of all backgrounds and genres.

This course will focus on the state's role in promoting economic growth and distribution in the developing world. The core organizing question for the course is: why have some regions of the developing world been more successful at industrialization and/or poverty alleviation than other regions. The students will learn about the patterns of development in Asia, Africa and Latin America, with special attention to such countries as China, India, South Korea, Nigeria and Brazil. General challenges that face all developing countries - globalization, establishing democracy and ethnic fragmentation - will also be analyzed.

This course focuses on the works of individuals and collectives whose projects challenge traditional notions of women's writing and representation. From renowned authors like Clarice Lispector to contemporary figures such as Txai Suruí and Djaimilia Pereira, we will look at writers and artists with gender identities ranging from cisgender to transgender and non-binary, examining how their interventions reshape the feminist canon. By connecting words, bodies, and voices, and engaging with works from outside the Portuguese-speaking world, we will analyze how feminist ideas move and transform across languages, cultures, and experiences.

An introduction to Machado de Assis (1839-1908), the course aims at comprehending how the best-known and most canonical Brazilian author has been "whitened" and how a true "Black Turn" is now responsible for new readings of his works and life. Machado's peculiar, subtle way of dealing with race in pre- and pos-Abolition Brazil will be analyzed, so we can understand how within certain contemporary circles he's become a "quebradeiro" (a person who belongs to the peripheries), without having ever lost his centrality in the country's "ciudad letrada" (Lettered City).

This is an introduction to Lima Barreto (1881-1922). The 100th anniversary of his death coincided with the 100 years of the "Semana de Arte Moderna," a landmark of Modernism in Brazil. Unike the Spanish American "vanguardias," Brazilian Modernism was influenced by the primitivism of the European avant-garde, which saw Black and Indigenous people as the unconscious bearers of modernity. We study how Barreto's literature, which explored popular orality and religions, was expelled from the literary cannon and how the author has re-emerged as one of the most meaningful Black voices of the Brazilian Republic.

This class will concentrate on some of the earliest and most extensive religious and historical texts authored by Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, specifically by the Maya, Mexica (Aztec), Hopi, and Diné (Navajo). This set will allow for a critical and comparative study of Native rhetoric, mythic motifs, notions of space and time, morals, and engagements with non-Native peoples and Christianity.

Love is the subject of the world's greatest stories. The passions aroused by Helen of Troy brought down a city and made Homer's masterpiece possible, while the foolishness of those in love inspired Shakespeare and Cervantes to create their most memorable characters. Many powerful Latin American and Spanish stories deal with the force and effects of love. In this course, we will study a group of films and literary fictions that focus on different kinds and forms of love. We will pay special attention to the forms of narrative love (quest, courting, adultery, heartbreaking), as well as the translation of love into language, body, and image.

An introduction to modern Latin American cultures and artistic and literary traditions through a wide spectrum of materials. We will discuss relevant issues in Latin American cultural, political, and social history, including the legacies of colonialism, the African diaspora, national fictions, gender and racial politics. Materials include short stories by Jorge Luis Borges and Samanta Schweblin; poems by Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén and Mexican poet Sara Uribe; paintings by Mexican muralists; films by Santiago Mitre and Claudia Llosa; writings by Indigenous activist Ailton Krenak.

This course will explore dominant ideas of "nature" that have shaped Latin America as a space of "natural frontiers" for commercial exploitation, territorial power, adventure, and exuberance. We will also become familiar with the specific histories from which these ideas emerge, their ecological and planetary impacts, and how Latin American ordinary people, creators, and intellectuals (including women, Indigenous peoples, and Afro-Latin Americans) have challenged these imaginaries by foregrounding their forms of world-making with the non-human. Ultimately, this course will explore dominant and alternative forms of inhabiting the planet.

In this course, we will analyze the place of racism in the link between culture and power in processes of nation building in Latin America. We will study three historical milestones associated with specific intellectual and political moments: the positivism of the early twentieth century, the developmentalism of the 1950s, and the current neoliberal era. We will analyze how ideas of race have changed over time and their role in the construction of national projects in Argentina, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic. This course will be taught in Spanish.

In response to the rise of neoliberalism, Latin(x) American artists and writers turned to memory as a poetic force to challenge the monumentalization of history. This course examines how feminist and queer perspectives highlight the tension between fragments and totality, residues and fixed narratives, reimagining memory as a form of resistance. It explores memory across various media, analyzing themes of gendered violence, feminicide, post-dictatorship trauma, and racial marginalization in the works of artists and writers like Cecilia Vicuña, Óscar Muñoz, and Rosana Paulino, among others.

Every archive is a posthumous device. To archive is to die a little bit, even when the archived author still lives. This seminar explores another function of archives, namely, that they go beyond the funereal and give rise to somatic permutations that challenge the division between living and dying, between an author's material end and the cessation of artistic production. We look beyond death to examine the creative and plastic afterlife, or what develops and survives independent of the author's living hand. To write again, the dead author relies on the prosthetic hands of others. The archive lies beyond life's closed circuit.

This course will study the system of international protection, who is understood to qualify and why, how the system has changed over time, and what these developments mean for a broader understanding of human rights across borders. We will also take a critical look at asylum, examine ideas of deservingness and innocence and their intersection with categories of race, class, and gender, and question what it means for certain people to be constructed as victims and others to be seen as not eligible for protection. This class will also collaborate with a New York organization to work directly on ongoing asylum claims.

This seminar offers an intensive introduction to the principles and practices of dramaturgical and performance analysis of stage plays as written works, as blueprints for theatrical performance, and as exercises in worldmaking. This seminar also rehearses how the techniques of dramaturgical and performance analysis might be applied to modes of embodied enactment - whether historical or contemporary, whether in art or everyday life - beyond the theatrical frame. In Spring 2025, the course will focus on the life, work, and legacy of the pathbreaking Cuban-American playwright, director, designer, and teacher María Irene Fornés (1930-2018).