Latin American & Caribbean Studies Autumn 2026 Courses

LACS 12200 (PORT 12200)
Staff
MWF 11:30 – 12:20PM

This course is intended for speakers of Spanish to develop competence quickly in spoken and written Portuguese. In this intermediate-level course, students learn ways to apply their Spanish language skills to mastering Portuguese by concentrating on the similarities and differences between the two languages. Students with a placement of 20100 or higher in any of the other Romance Languages are eligible to take PORT 12200 for completion of the College Language Competency Requirement.

LACS 12201 (KREY 12201)
Gerdine Ulysse
MWF 10:30 – 11:20AM

This course is intended for speakers of other Romance Languages to quickly develop competence in spoken and written Kreyol (Kreyòl Ayisyen). In this introductory course, students learn ways to apply their skills in another Romance language to master Kreyol by concentrating on the similarities and differences between the two languages. Although familiarity with a Romance language is strongly recommended, students with no prior knowledge of a Romance Languages, and heritage learners, are also welcome.

LACS 16100 (SOSC 26100; RDIN 16100; ANTH 23101; HIST 16101)

Section 1: MW 1:30 – 2:50PM

Section 2: TR 11:00 – 12:20PM

Section 3: TR 2:00 – 3:20PM

Autumn Quarter examines the origins of Indigenous civilizations in what we now call Latin America, with a focus on the political, social, and cultural dimensions of groups including the Maya, the Inca, and the Aztecs; the causes and consequences of the Spanish and Portuguese conquests; and the construction of colonial societies and economies in the 16th century.

LACS 20310 (SPAN 20310; CHST 20310)
Maria Lozada Cerna
MW 1:30 – 2:50PM

Chicago is known to have multiple, diverse Spanish-speaking communities. In this course, students will use these communities as their classroom to analyze and debate current issues confronting the LatinX experience in the United States and Midwest. In parallel, class instruction will reinforce and expand students' grammatical and lexical proficiency in a manner that will allow students to engage in real-life activities involving speaking, reading, listening and writing skills. This intermediate-high language course targets the development of writing skills and oral proficiency in Spanish and is designed as an alternative to SPAN 20300. Students will review problematic grammatical structures, write a number of essays, and participate in multiple class conversations using authentic readings and listening segments as linguistic models on which to base their own production. At the end of class, students are expected to produce an individual project.

LACS 21001 (SOSC 21001; HIST 29304; LLSO 21001; CHST 21001; HMRT 21001; DEMS 21001)
Susan Gzesh
TR 3:30 – 4:50PM

This course examines basic human rights norms and concepts and selected contemporary human rights problems from across the globe, including human rights implications of the COVID pandemic. Beginning with an overview of the present crises and significant actors on the world stage, we will then examine the political setting for the United Nations' approval of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in 1948. The post-World War 2 period was a period of optimism and fertile ground for the establishment of a universal rights regime, given the defeat of fascism in Europe. International jurists wanted to establish a framework of rights that went beyond the nation-state, taking into consideration the partitions of India-Pakistan and Israel-Palestine - and the rising expectations of African-Americans in the U.S. and colonized peoples across Africa and Asia. But from the beginning, there were basic contradictions in a system of rights promulgated by representatives of nation-states that ruled colonial regimes, maintained de facto and de jure systems of racial discrimination, and imprisoned political dissidents and journalists. Cross-cutting themes of the course include the universalism of human rights, problems of impunity and accountability, notions of "exceptionalism," and the emerging issue of the "shamelessness" of authoritarian regimes. Students will research a human rights topic of their choosing, to be presented as either a final research paper or a group presentation.

LACS 21100 (SPAN 21100)
Felipe Pieras-Guasp
MW 3:00 – 4:20PM

This sociolinguistic course expands understanding of the historical development of Spanish and awareness of the great sociocultural diversity within the Spanish-speaking world and its impact on the Spanish language. We emphasize the interrelationship between language and culture as well as ethno-historical transformations within the different regions of the Hispanic world. Special consideration is given to identifying lexical variations and regional expressions exemplifying diverse sociocultural aspects of the Spanish language, and to recognizing phonological differences between dialects. We also examine the impact of indigenous cultures on dialectical aspects. The course includes literary and nonliterary texts, audio-visual materials, and visits by native speakers of a variety of Spanish-speaking regions.

LACS 21600 (KREY 21600; GLST 21600; FREN 21601)
Gerdine Ulysse
MW 3:00 – 4:20PM

This course provides an interdisciplinary survey of the contemporary Francophone Caribbean. Students will study a wide range of its cultural manifestations (performing arts like music and dance, literature, cinema, architecture and other visual arts, gastronomy). Attention is also paid to such sociolinguistic issues as the coexistence of French and Kreyòl, and the standardization of Kreyòl.

LACS 21601 (PORT 20600)
Juliano Saccomani
MW 1:30 – 2:50PM

This course aims to enhance linguistic abilities and cultural awareness of students of Portuguese by providing opportunities for structured discussion, analysis, and exploration of issues relevant to language use in academic, professional, and social settings. Through a variety of literacy-oriented exercises, including all modes of communication and related to different topics and genres, students continue to develop their proficiencies, cross-cultural knowledge, and general language ability. Students will explore, analyze, and discuss a variety of global topics as can be observed through the unique lenses of the cultures of Lusophone countries and communities. To develop both their linguistic and intercultural competence, linguistic skills will be honed through a variety of cultural products that allow the students to reflect on the practices and perspectives of the target society, as well as their own. These products will range from readings, multimedia content (videos and films), and Virtual Reality videos and images specifically created for this course. This course fosters the development of writing skills and oral proficiency in Portuguese. Students will review problematic grammatical structures, write several essays, and participate in multiple class debates on topics related to literature, politics, history, and popular culture. It builds linguistic proficiency to address issues of increasingly theoretical complexity and engage in critical thinking.

LACS 22127 (SPAN 22127)
Azucena Garza
MW 3:00 – 4:20PM

When most people think of plantations, they often imagine eighteenth- and nineteenth-century monocrop agricultural estates in the US South and the Caribbean that relied on enslaved African labor. This course expands that understanding by pairing twentieth- and twenty-first-century narratives from Mexico with those from Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. In the late nineteenth century, an agricultural export boom swept across much of Latin America, bringing far-reaching consequences, including the emergence of debt servitude in Mexico and the industrialization of sugarcane production in Cuba. This comparative approach helps us understand the plantation's ongoing influence on modern imaginaries, even after the plantation complex was eroded. What are the major topics, works, and tropes through which the plantation has been imagined in contemporary Latin America? Drawing on travel writing, slave narratives, fiction, film, and telenovelas, the course explores how writers and cultural producers from the early twentieth century to the present mobilize the plantation as a space for negotiating questions of property and personhood, race and labor, political belonging and nationhood, as well as love and gender in their respective historical moments. Readings include works by Jean Rhys, Rosario Castellanos, John Kenneth Turner, Reinaldo Arenas, Bruno Traven, and Rosario Ferré.

LACS 23525 (SPAN 23525)
Jean Vallejo Gonzalez
TR 11:00 – 12:20PM

This course explores how Latin American cinema reacted to its changing political contexts, from the second half of the 20th century into the present. With an emphasis on experimental films, this course examines how aesthetic innovation can function as a form of political resistance. We will discuss how cinema registered processes of resistance during and after military dictatorships in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Guatemala, and Chile, as well as how the precarious economies of Colombia, México, Perú and Ecuador encouraged new modes of cinematic self-representation. The 1950s will serve as a starting point, thusly exploring how the Puerto Rican Constitution in 1952 and the Cuban Revolution in 1959 fostered new models of state-sponsored experimental cinema that inspired subsequent Latin American films. Our focus will be on experimental cinema that blurs the boundaries between documentary and fiction in a manner that the aesthetics of film language are used as an expression of collective political subjectivity. The relationship between Latin America and the United States will be crucial for this discussion, as it foregrounds the colonial and postcolonial dimensions of resistance articulated in these films. We will see films by Raúl Ruiz (Chile), Luis Ospina (Colombia), Sara Gómez (Cuba), Amílcar Tirado (Puerto Rico), Grupo Chaski (Peru), Miguel Alvear (Ecuador), and Eduardo Coutinho (Brazil); among others.

LACS 23930 (HMRT 23930; LLSO 23930; CHST 23900)
Lindsay Gifford
T 9:30 – 12:20PM

The city of Chicago has welcomed over 45,000 migrants and asylum-seekers from Latin America over the past few years and has witnessed efforts to effect a welcoming and sanctuary city through government, non-profit, mutual aid network and individual volunteer work. Students in this course will conduct in-person field research with migrants and service networks to explore the ways that Chicagoans both new and established imagine and attempt to create a sanctuary or welcoming city. Through field research practice, students will gain experience with ethnographic methods of participant-observation, taking fieldnotes, conducting interviews and ethnographic writing. Accompanying course readings will guide us through ethnographic methods, the root causes of migration, migration pathways and infrastructure, refugee and migrant reception and sanctuary city concepts and policies.

LACS 24001 (RDIN 24001; SOSC 24001; ANTH 24001; HIST 18301)

Section 1: TR 11:00 – 12:20PM

Section 2: TR 2:00 – 3:20PM

Section 3: MW 9:00 – 10:20AM

Section 4: MW 10:30 – 11:50AM

Section 5: TR 1:30 – 2:50PM

This quarter examines the making of the Atlantic world in the aftermath of European colonial expansion. Focusing on the Caribbean, North and South America, and western Africa, we cover the dynamics of invasion, representation of otherness, enslavement, colonial economies and societies, as well as resistance and revolution.

LACS 26212/36212 (SPAN 26210/36210; GNSE 26210/36210; GNSE 20172)
Larissa Brewer-Garcia
TR 12:30 – 1:50PM

This course examines representations of women's bodies and sexualities in early modern Iberian and colonial Latin American writings. We will study the body through a variety of lenses: the anatomical body as a site of construction of sexual difference, the witch's body as a site of sexual excess, the mystic's body as a double of the possessed body, the tortured body as a site of knowledge production, and the racialized bodies of women as sites to govern sexuality, spirituality, labor, and property in the reaches of the Spanish Empire.

LACS 26330/36330 (ANTH 26330/36330; CEGU 26330; HIST 26330/36330)
Sarah Newman
T 2:00 – 4:50PM

What do we know about the ancient Maya? Pyramids, palaces, and temples are found from Mexico to Honduras, texts in hieroglyphic script record the histories of kings and queens who ruled those cities, and painted murals, carved stone stelae, and ceramic vessels provide a glimpse of complex geopolitical dynamics and social hierarchies. Decades of archaeological research have expanded that view beyond the rulers and elites to explore the daily lives of the Maya people, networks of trade and market exchange, and agricultural and ritual practices. Present-day Maya communities attest to the dynamism and vitality of languages and traditions, often entangled in the politics of archaeological heritage and tourism. This course is a wide-ranging exploration of ancient Maya civilization and of the various ways archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, historians, and indigenous communities have examined and manipulated the Maya past. From tropes of long-hidden mysteries rescued from the jungle to New Age appropriations of pre-Columbian rituals, from the thrill of decipherment to painstaking and technical artifact studies, we will examine how models drawn from astrology, ethnography, classical archaeology and philology, political science, and popular culture have shaped current understandings of the ancient Maya world, and also how the Maya world has, at times, resisted easy appropriation and defied expectations.

LACS 26509/36509 (HIST 26509/36509; LLSO 26509; KNOW 36509; CEGU 26509/36509)
Brodwyn Fischer
TR 12:30 – 1:50PM

This course will examine the history of law and citizenship in Latin America from the 19th to the 21st centuries. After a brief introduction to the so-called "Civil Law Tradition" that structures law across much of the world, we will explore the following themes: the development of Latin American constitutions, laws, and legal systems; the ways the operation of these systems has shaped citizenship and exclusion; the relationship between legal and other inequalities; the intersection of law and informality; and how legal history can shed light on broader questions of race, liberalism, family, gender, migration, urbanity, violence, policing, state terror, and the environment.

LACS 26510/36510 (HIST 26511/36511; ARCH 26511; CEGU 26511/36511)
Brodwyn Fischer
MW 1:30 – 2:50PM

Latin America is one of the world's most urbanized regions and its urban heritage long predates European conquest. Yet the region's urban experience has generally been understood through North Atlantic models, which often treat Latin American cities as disjunctive, distorted knockoffs of idealized US or European cities. This class interrogates and expands those North Atlantic visions by emphasizing the history of vital urban issues such as informality, inequality, intimacy, race, gender, violence, plural regulatory regimes, the urban environment, and rights to the city. Interdisciplinary course materials include anthropology, sociology, history, fiction, film, photography, and journalism produced from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries.

LACS 29205 (HIST 26307; FNDL 29205)
Mauricio Tenorio
M 9:30 – 12:20PM

Through complex and evolving perspectives of time, reading, language, and writing, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) developed both an "ethics" and a "technics" of the "intellectual" vis-à-vis literature, history, and philosophy. Over the 20th century, the political and cultural consideration of his ethics and technics varied depending on the moment, but the debates only increased Borges´ influence as a language crafter and as a thinker, beyond the language he chose to write (Spanish, he could have been an English writer, but he opted for Spanish). The course will seek to serve as a collective close reading of the prose works (fiction and non-fiction) by Jorge Luis Borges, relying on excellent editions and translations: J. L. Borges, Collected Fictions (Viking, Pinguin 1998), translated by Andrew Hurley, and Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions (Pinguin 2000), edited and translate by Eliot Weinberger, Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine. Each session will consist of a short contextualization and introduction by the instructor, a general discussion, and a short dialogue especially addressing the concerns of those students who decide to read Borges´ works in the original Spanish.

LACS 29801
Diana Schwartz Francisco 
F 9:30 – 12:20PM

How and why do we study Latin America, the Caribbean, and their global diaspora? Why does it matter? The LACS BA Proseminar 1) introduces students to cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholarship about Latin America, the Caribbean, and their global diaspora; 2) helps them identify methodological fields of interest; and 3) leads them on an independent research project that may serve as the groundwork for an honors thesis. Students will engage with leading scholars in the field, learn about the history of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latine Studies in the City of Chicago, and upon course completion, articulate what Latin American & Caribbean Studies is and its relevance. This proseminar is required for all LACS Majors and is open to third- and fourth-year students.