This course focuses on the networks, the imaginaries and the lives inhabited by Black artists, makers, and subjects from the 18th through 19th centuries. It revolves around the Caribbean (particularly the Anglophone Caribbean), North America and Europe. We will reflect on how pre-twentieth century Black artists are written into history or written out of it. We will explore the aesthetic innovation of these artists and the visionary worlds they created, and examine their travels, their writings, along with the social worlds and communities they formed. The course incorporates lectures and readings and, if possible, museum visits.

This course explores the central role of food in everyday life in US and global contexts. Using a comparative global perspective, we will address key questions about histories of food production and consumption, the ways in which food production and distribution differentially affect the lives of those working in the food industry and those consuming food. We will think through how global shifts in food production and distribution impact human lives on national, local, and familial levels.

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.

Bachelorhood is at the center of diverse forms of architectural programs, assuming massive connotations and demographic significance. It has shaped much of what we know about dormitories, boardinghouses, hostels, studios, garçonnières, penthouse apartments and minimum housing experiments. Despite its pivotal role in the history of domestic architecture, it has been neglected as an exceptional or temporary status. The seminar explores multiple meanings of singleness and its typological responses as a key for understanding and rethinking modern household paradigms, housing policies and residential design in Latin America and elsewhere.

This course focuses on key issues of 20th and 21st c. Latin American art. A thematic survey and general methodological introduction, we will treat emblematic works and movements, from Mexican muralism and Indigenism to experiments with abstraction, pop, conceptualism, and performance. Questions discussed include: What is Latin American art? What is modernism in Latin America? What is the legacy of colonialism? How do Latin American artists engage transnational networks of solidarity under conditions of repression? How can postcolonial, decolonial, and feminist theory illuminate the art and criticism produced in and about Latin America?

How have collecting practices shaped the perception of Indigenous cultures in the Americas? The recognition and reception of native art and architecture reflects the evolving intellectual preoccupations of collectors over 500 years. Charting this history, topics will include the role of archaeological illustrations; the invocation of national identities; issues of appropriation in modern and contemporary art; the faking and restoration of objects; the ethical considerations of museum display; the reconstruction of ruins into tourist destinations; and misrepresentations in New Age religiosity, conspiracy theories, and popular entertainment.

This course studies contemporary Latin American & Caribbean literature and visual arts. Looking at the changing relationships between aesthetics and politics, we will analyze how textual and visual works respond to different forms of violence and express other forms of imagining relations among bodies, communities, and territories. Texts will be available in the original & translation. Some classes will take place at the Art Museum study room at Firestone

This course explores questions and practices of liberation in writings by women philosophers and poets whose work helped to create cultural and political movements in the U.S. and Latin America. Starting in the 60s, we will study a poetics and politics of liberation, paying special attention to the role played by language and imagination when ideas translate onto social movements related to social justice, structural violence, education, care, and the commons. Readings include Gloria Anzaldúa, Angela Davis, Silvia Federici, Diamela Eltit, Audre Lorde, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Gayatri Spivak, Zapatistas, among others.

What is colonization? How does it work? What kind of societies does it create? Come find out through the lens of the Latin America. First we study how the Aztec and Inca empires subdued other peoples, and how Muslim Iberia fell to the Christians. Then, we learn about Spanish and Portuguese conquests and how indigenous resistance, adaptation, and racial mixing shaped the continent. You will see gods clash and meld, cities rise and decline, and insurrections fail or win. Silver mines will boom and bust, slaves will toil and rebel; peasants will fight capitalist encroachments. This is a comprehensive view of how Latin America became what it is.

This seminar explores Mexico's history from independence (1821) to the contemporary era. We delve into the contentious process of nation building, the explosive outbreak of the first major social revolution of the 20th century, and the creation of a remarkably durable one-party state that was far from revolutionary. Readings focus on the political, social, and cultural negotiations that shaped these processes. Key themes include indigeneity, political violence and dissent, migration, urbanization, capitalism and the environment, and Mexico's relationship with the U.S. We will also visit the university museum to analyze revolutionary art.

We cover the history, historiography and theory of Latin America's early modernity. Canonical works are compared to recent literature in economic, social, political, environmental, and cultural history. Key questions: Why and how do historiographical modes change? Is colonization a class, national, or ethnic phenomenon? Why does Spanish colonization in the Americas differ from French, English, and Portuguese? Why did the peasantry survive in Latin America and not elsewhere in the continent? Was race structuring? How did Latin America become capitalist? Welcome, students of early modernity, empires, the Americas, global history, and pedagogy.

In this seminar we will examine the variety of responses adopted in Latin America to the need for an energy transition. We begin with an overview of climate change on a global scale and its impact on Latin America. We follow with a general discussion of important sectoral issues that arise in any energy transition and different policy responses that seem to be available, examining their pros and cons/costs and benefits. The final two weeks consider various 'ideal' policy options for an energy transition suited to national situations.

How can we grasp and conceptualize the experience of being displaced from home, stranded in a refugee camp, or living undocumented in a foreign country? This interdisciplinary course explores this question by interpreting literature, cultural and political theory, international law, film, and art on forced displacement by twentieth-century and contemporary Latin American authors and artists. Its goal is to provide students with a sophisticated critical vocabulary and a sound historical perspective to grapple with the cultural, ethical, historical, and political implications of today's global migratory and refugee crises.

This course explores the relationship between gender and power through an analysis of "practices of craftsmanship" of so-called rebellious Latin American women who were seen as witches, traitors, even monsters, but also as enchanters, healers, and creators. We will examine women's skills, artistry, and agency, often dismissed as "malos saberes" (bad knowledge) in literature, performance, songs, and the visual arts. Starting with an exploration of witches in colonial times, our journey includes mythic, literary and cultural figures such as La Malinche, Frida Kahlo, Gabriela Mistral, and Doña Bárbara.

Central America resurfaced with El Salvador's war on gangs, arresting over 75,000 people in the past two years. This course will examine the history and politics of carceral logics around crime and race in Central America through an intersectional and ethnographic perspective. Starting with a historical excavation, we'll focus on Central America's war on gangs from a transnational perspective, including the role of the U.S. in the making of a "gang crisis", and we will examine the policing of black and indigenous populations. Throughout the course, we will discuss how carceral politics shape forms of intimacy, especially in the family realm.

The ancestral home of millions of dwellers, the symbolic space of the Amazon rainforest and its cities has been dominated by colonial thought for almost 500 years. Fortunately, the last few decades have witnessed the emergence of critically engaged Indigenous artists, whose productions provide a decolonizing perspective and create a broader and deeper artistic imagination. This course will critically examine how writers, travelers, and visual artists have imagined and re-imagined Amazonia.

From Greek atomism to modern liberalism, the individual has reigned supreme as the organizing principle of meaning. Driven by the rejection of "Western" assumptions, contemporary thought and artistic practice have experimented with forms of collective cognition. The seminar aims to analyze some of these experiments, from the Portuguese-speaking world and beyond, and thus measure whether we are capable of thinking and feeling beyond the prison of the individual, or even without it.

By taking a comparative approach, this course examines the role of social, economic, and political factors in the emergence and transformation of modern cities in the United States and selected areas of Latin America. We consider the city in its dual image: both as a center of progress and as a redoubt of social problems, especially poverty. Attention is given to spatial processes that have resulted in the aggregation and desegregation of populations differentiated by social class and race.

This course offers an introduction to modern Latin American literature and culture. It focuses on the complex ways in which cultural and intellectual production anticipates, participates in, and responds to political, social, and economic transformations in the 20th and 21st centuries. Through a wide spectrum of sources (essays, fiction, poetry, film, and art), students will study and discuss some of the most relevant issues in Latin American modern history, such as modernity, democracy, identity, gender, memory, and social justice.

"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it," states philosopher Hanna Arendt. This course studies the magic of storytelling in Latin America's rich archive of short stories from indigenous tales retold by Nobel prize winner Miguel Angel Asturias and the philosophical fictions of J. L. Borges and Julio Cortázar to contemporary short masterpieces by Mariana Enríquez, Samanta Schweblin, and Junot Díaz. Each class will be devoted to the close reading of one masterful short-story. Students also will practice the art of storytelling by reconstructing stories behind Latin American photography, painting, and sculpture.

This course explores the vast linguistic diversity of the Americas: native languages, pidgins, creoles, mixed languages, and other languages in North, Central, and South America, including the Caribbean. We will examine historical and current issues of multilingualism to understand the relationship between language, identity, and social mobility. We will discuss how languages played a central role in colonization and nation-building processes, and how language policies contribute to linguistic loss and revitalization. This course has no prerequisites and is intended for students interested in learning more about languages in the Americas.

How are ideas of belonging to the body politic defined in Spain, Latin America, and in Spanish-speaking communities in the United States? Who is "Latin American," "Latinx," "Boricua," "Chino," "Moor," "Indian," etc.? Who constructs these terms and why? Who do they include/exclude? Why do we need these identity markers in the first place? Our course will engage these questions by surveying and analyzing literary, historical, and visual productions from the time of the foundation of the Spanish empire to the present time in the Spanish-speaking world.

How do images communicate the pain of others? What made art so troubling that led people to attack it, and to try to regulate it? This course explores the connections between art and violence in Spain and its empire during the early modern period, a period of globalization, religious conflict, and cross-cultural encounter. We will interrogate how did representations of war, martyrdom, and sexual violence affect their viewers and shape their ideologies, and explore the dangerous power of images by focusing on phenomena such as censorship, iconoclasm, and racism.

Film is comprised of multiple surfaces: the screen, the actors, the structure of the darkroom, the mobile devices of the audiovisual present, the bodies that vibrate around us, the actual strip of plastic that records the images... Critics have already broadly debated how film touches us politically and emotionally. This seminar formulates a different question: how do we touch film? In Latin America, the interaction between filmic skins is founded on the relationship between art and politics. We will consider how filmmakers debate the politics of the surface and how spectatorship poses a deeply political problem for the region.

This course focuses on documentation and the returns of the real in Latin American fiction, art, photography, theater, and film that seek to represent, record, or enact the real, social life,and/or the natural world in an accurate, truthful way, and that claim to embody some kind of epistemological or evidentiary truth. We cover a wide range of debates about representation and realism, from nineteenth century non-fiction and the real maravilloso to more recent developments in documentary photography, theater, and film. Readings include texts by Arias, Barthes, Borges, Brecht, Bellatin, Carpentier, Foster, Jaar, Cabrera Infante, and Coutinho.

For the first time, most people now live in cities. One in seven humans lives in an urban slum. We analyze the political, economic, and social dynamics that both create and arise from urbanization, informality, and attempts to govern our contemporary urban world. We ask how formal and informal institutions change inequalities of shelter, work, race, and other social identities, across urban space. We investigate the links between the processes of urbanization and climate change, and how they shape the politics of cities. We draw from cases across the globe and the US, along with a range of social science methods and theoretical perspectives.

This course offers an overview of Latin America's political and economic development issues. Understanding the region's challenges from institutions to infrastructure, from inequality to insecurity, from poverty to social development, will provide a broad perspective. Also analyzing successful policies inside the region or in other parts of the world, contributes to discuss areas of enhancement: institutions, human capital, competitiveness, investment, equality, and stability among others. In addition, the course intends to explore history and renewed opportunities in the relationship between the US and Latin America.