Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Current Courses

The concentration draws on courses across departments and emphasizes critical thinking, regional knowledge, and practical experience

Breadcrumb

Current Courses

The concentration draws on courses across departments and emphasizes critical thinking, regional knowledge, and practical experience

LACA 1504T | Latin American Feminisms

Andrea González-Ramírez

This course offers an interdisciplinary overview of Latin American feminisms from the 19th century to the present. It will explore the political demands during the emerging republics, feminist struggles within proletarian movements, resistance to civic-military dictatorships, transnational expropriations, sexual dissident struggles, and the critical approaches linking class, sex, racialization, and gender. The course will also examine current challenges posed by conservative far-right movements in the region. Students will be encouraged to develop their own proposals through scientific or creative research questions. Students will be encouraged to develop their own proposals through scientific or creative research questions.
This course is taught entirely in Spanish.

Watch course trailer>>

LACA 1504S | The Knowing Body; Memory, Grief and the Practice of Listening

Sandra B. Sánchez López

In Latin America, initiatives to address violent pasts, authoritarian regimes and civil wars through accords and peacebuilding have prompted calls from public historians to integrate historical analyses into transitional justice processes and public debate. Through this interdisciplinary course with a practice-as-research methodology, students will develop a performative project exploring memory, affect, and the history of grief and resilience in Latin American historical contexts. Students are given the option to select a specific socio-political violence, reconciliation, and restoration experience in the Latin American region for their final collective project.

Watch course trailer>>

Spring 2026 Courses

LACA 1900: Research and Methodologies in Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Tuesdays, 4:00-6:30 p.m.

PhD Candidate, Joao Pedro Coleta

The course will offer students a collaborative learning environment where their research ideas can be developed and discussed with fellow students and a range of LACA faculty. During the course, the instructor will facilitate the development of research ideas and expose students to research methods, tools, and resources specific to the study of Latin America and the Caribbean. Moreover, the instructor will train students to develop research and creative projects and enhance their ability to write and communicate their ideas, produce effective and generative research questions, and/or produce innovative creative projects in a robust and convincing manner. 

LACA 1504U: The Gender of Debt: The Circulation of Women in Amazonia

Wednesdays, 3:00-5:30 p.m.

CLACS Cogut Visiting Professor Flávia Melo da Cunha

This course offers a critical and interdisciplinary exploration of women’s circulation in Amazonia, inspired by Denise Ferreira da Silva’s The Unpayable Debt (2024) and Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred: Blood Ties (2019). We will examine how Black feminist poetics challenges linear notions of time, social hierarchies, and systems of exploitation. Using Verenilde Pereira’s novel Um Rio sem Fim (1998) as a central text, the course analyzes historical and contemporary displacements of indigenous and racialized women in the Amazon, connecting these issues to transnational feminist debates on care, indebtedness, and social repair.

The course will be taught in Portuguese. 

HISP/ LACA 1371V: A Nation in Its Labyrinth: An Introduction to Colombia

TTh 2:30pm-3:50 pm

Hispanic Studies Professor Felipe Martínez-Pinzón and CLACS Cogut Visiting Professor Sandra B. Sánchez–López

Tobacco, Rubber, Bananas, Coffee, Coca, Orchids… The image of Colombia has traveled the world under the guise of tropical products linked to speed, pleasure, violence and exoticism. But what lies behind the deceiving, magical spell of these traveling products? This course will travel back from the product to the place where these plants were tended to and flourished. The works of renowned artists such as García Márquez and lesser-known masters like Marvel Moreno or Débora Arango will allow us to read against the grain the history of a country crisscrossed by the diversity of its people and the beauty of its environments. Even though the histories of violence and social conflict will traverse this course, so will the warm sounds of cumbia, the voices of its poets and the green joy of its landscapes.

Cross Listed Courses:

  • AFRI 1441: Caribbean and Latin American Migration: Race, Gender, Community *This course fulfills WRIT & Survey Requirement*
  • COLT 0710N: A Comparative Introduction to the Literatures of the Americas *This course fulfills WRIT Requirement*
  • COLT 0510S: Latinx Aesthetics in the Mainstream
  • HISP 0750B: The Latin American Diaspora in the US - We encourage you to take this course! *This course fulfills WRIT Requirement*
  • HISP 2600: Exploring and Extracting in Colonial Latin American Literatures
  • HIST 0234: Modern Latin America *This course fulfills WRIT Requirement*
  • HIST 0256: Introduction to Latinx History
  • HIST 1340: History of the Andes
  • POBS 1080: Performing Brazil: Language, Theater, Culture