Courses

This course will analyze the role of cinema in the construction (and deconstruction) of national and transnational discourses in the Portuguese-speaking world. We will examine a number of recurring cultural topics in a wide variety of films from Africa, Brazil and Europe, situating works within their socio-historical contexts and tracing the development of national cinemas and their interaction with global aesthetics and trends.

An introduction to the analysis of contemporary cultural texts and objects (literature, film, photography, art, theatre, images) from Spain, with the support of various theoretical ideas. The course's main objective is to provide students with a set of strong conceptual, analytical and linguistic skills, which will be of great help in 300-level literature and culture courses.

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 explores recent cultural and artistic productions that deal with human rights and political violence issues in contemporary Latin America, focusing on the politics of memory behind representations of the past in the context of a "global" marketing of memory. By working with literature, testimony, film, photography, truth commissions, and processes of museification, it analyzes different modes of figuring the past as well as the areas that these languages leave aside when memory becomes the target of a "global market" and "trauma tourism."

In this seminar, we will discuss ideas about conversion, authorship, translation, and histories in the context of Indigenous people's engagement with Christianity in colonial Mexico. In particular, we will be looking at the ways that Native Americans shaped Mexican Catholicism and the ways we can think of Indigenous people as authors and creators of their religious traditions rather than merely adopters or receivers of the Christian faith as taught by Spanish colonists.

This seminar will focus on the modern architecture and urbanism in Havana, including the old colonial city, Art Deco, the International Style, the footprint of the American presence (from the mob to the sugar mills), buildings from the Cuban Revolution and the Soviet period. How can Cuba's world-class heritage survive the pressures being brought by the continued violence of the embargo, the rising flood damage due to climate change, and the social impacts of gentrification? Given the absence of large-scale industry, what are the social and environmental costs of the tourism industry which constitutes the main livelihood of the island?

A study of the role of heterotopic architectural spaces in 20th-century literature, with special emphasis on "perverse spaces" (brothels, hotels, arcades, chambers, cells, voyeuristic and exhibitionistic configurations). We will read novels by Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Salvador Novo, Reinaldo Arenas, Roberto Bolaño, Michel Houellebecq, and theories of space and sexuality by Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Beatriz Colomina, Beatriz Preciado, Anthony Vidler, Mark Wigley, and Rem Koolhaas.