Courses

This course is an introduction to crime fiction from early 20th-century "locked room" mysteries to 21st century narco-narratives. It examines short stories, novels, films and critical writings about detective and crime fiction in Latin America and Spain. Topics include the genre's links to high and low literature, to film and to historical contexts such as immigration, state crime, drug culture and globalization. Authors include Roberto Arlt, María Elvira Bermúdez, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, Alicia Giménez Bartlett, Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Ricardo Piglia, Fernando Vallejo, and others.

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.

An exploration of a series of critically acclaimed contemporary Latin American films, accompanied by readings that provide a theoretical and historical framework for its analysis. Topics to be discussed, among others: subalternity and the Third World; sexual and racial politics; postcolonial poetics; genocide; cultural hybridism and mestizaje; dictatorship and populism; biopolitical fantasies.

This course explores the history of African slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean from the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade in the early sixteenth century to Brazilian emancipation in 1888. The course will focus on the lived experiences of enslaved Africans, while also examining the broader social, political, legal, and cultural contexts. The assigned materials will include a variety of written primary and secondary sources, films, and visual images.

We survey the Amazonian region as the product of dynamic historical, economic, and ecological processes, focusing on how ethnographic traditions have contributed to its construction. From accounts of shamanism to reflections on the ethics of ethnographic fieldwork, anthropological debates around Amazonian cultures have animated broader discussions about the consequences of resource exploitation, the boundaries of nature and culture, and what it means to be human. We identify some traditional themes of Amazonian anthropology and examine emerging spaces, actors, and questions that continue to make the region relevant to anthropological inquiry.

This course will introduce students to debates and approaches in the Digital Humanities from a global perspective. We will consider the foundations of DH while also discussing concerns involving access, maintenance, and care for projects over time in regions with physical restraints such as connectivity restrictions. On seminar days, we will work through theoretical concerns and explore the possibilities and limits of existing tools. On studio days, we work in small teams to gather data from primary sources in RBSC, which we will then use with software and platforms to build skills in computational analysis, data collection, and DH research.

Home to both shocking atrocities and heroic justice movements, Latin America illuminates the range of challenges, successes, tensions, and promises of the human rights project. Students will trace legacies of mass violations, such as those left by authoritarian rule. Students will then engage with contemporary human rights problems in the region, including the "war on drugs"; prison abuse; dissenters' rights; indigenous land struggles, sexual and reproductive rights; and economic, social and cultural rights in the face of extreme inequality.

This seminar discusses a selection of Mario Vargas Llosa's major political novels in dialogue with the works of political philosophy that shaped his thinking. Our discussion begins with Vargas Llosa's engagement with radical Marxism in his youth, his active participation in the Cuban Revolution in the early 1960s, leading up to his turn towards liberalism in the 1980s. Political theorists discussed include: Marx, Mariátegui, Sartre, Fidel Castro, Edmund Wilson, Karl Popper, Octavio Paz, Isaiah Berlin. Topics include: guerilla warfare, class struggle, the market, social justice.