Latin American & Caribbean Studies Spring 2026 Courses

LACS 12200 (PORT 12200)
Ana Lima
MWF 10:30 – 11:20 AM

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 14500 (PORT 14500)
Juliano Saccomani
MWF 11:30 – 12:20 PM

This is an accelerated language course that covers vocabulary and grammar for students interested in working in a business environment where Portuguese is spoken. The focus of this highly interactive class is to develop basic communication skills and cultural awareness through formal classes, readings, discussions, and writings. PORT 14500 satisfies the Language Competency Requirement.

LACS 15011 (GNSE 15011; RDIN 15011)
Kaneesha Parsard
MW 1:30 – 2:50 PM

What do intimacy, power, and community look like for women, queer and trans people in the Caribbean? We will study the history and present of Martinique's beaches, where sands can be a place of refuge for lovers. Listening to soca, the anthem of Carnival celebrations in Trinidad and beyond, we will understand how music and performance champion women's bodily autonomy and pleasure. Studying newly available archives, we will learn how newspapers like the Jamaica Gaily News (1977-1984) were the foundation of Jamaica's Gay Freedom Movement, creating community and sharing life-saving information. And, reading recent literature from across the Caribbean, we will see how women sharpen their voices against the threat of violence. We will also have the opportunity to learn from Caribbean scholars, artists, and writers working on gender and sexuality today in class visits. You will leave this course with insights into feminist and queer movements outside the U.S.; an understanding of how histories of indigenous dispossession, European colonialism, slavery, and Asian labor migration shaped the diversity of gender and sexual expressions in the Caribbean; and a new critical vocabulary for gender and sexuality. No prior familiarity with the Caribbean is required, and all readings will be in English or translated into English. All are welcome. This course counts as the third quarter of Civ for students who have completed the first two quarters of the sequence (GNSE 15002 and 15003).

LACS 16300 (ANTH 23103; HIST 16103; RDIN 16300; SOSC 26300)

Section 1: TTh 11:00 – 12:20PM with Nicholas Scott

Section 2: TTh 2:00 – 3:20PM with Nicholas Scott

Section 3: MW 1:30 – 2:50PM with Brodwyn Fischer

Spring Quarter focuses on the long twentieth century (1870+), with emphasis on how Latin American peoples and nations have grappled with the challenges of development, inequality, imperialism, revolution, authoritarianism, racial difference, migration, urbanization, citizenship, violence, and the environment.

LACS 20401 (KREY 20400; CHST 20400; RDIN 20410)
Gerdine Ulysse
W 4:30 – 6:20 PM

This course will provide opportunities to promote deeper knowledge of the Haitian culture while emphasizing the development of writing skills in the Kreyòl language through the use of a variety of authentic texts and cultural experiences. Topics covered in the course will include the Haitian revolution, cuisine, and audio-visual and performing arts. Moreover, students will participate in different cultural exploration outings in the city of Chicago, which will provide additional opportunities to interpret cultural artifacts and reflect on the Haitian culture and its influence on the representation and daily lives of Haitians in the diaspora, particularly in Chicago. In this course, we will: 1) analyze different cultural artifacts in the Haitian cultures through primary and secondary texts, 2) examine the influences of these cultural phenomena on the representation of Haitians and the creation of Haitian identity in the diaspora, and 3) and reflect on the importance of cultural identity in a migration context. Those who will take the course for Kreyòl credits will also develop additional syntactic knowledge in the language through creation of diverse essays. This course will be conducted in two weekly sessions: a common lecture session in English and an additional weekly discussion session in English or Kreyòl.

LACS 20600 (PORT 20600)
Ana Maria Lima
MWF 11:30 – 12:20 PM

The objective of this course is to help students acquire advanced grammatical knowledge of the Portuguese language through exposure to cultural and literary content with a focus on Brazil. Students develop skills to continue perfecting their oral and written proficiency and comprehension of authentic literary texts and recordings, while also being exposed to relevant sociocultural and political contemporary topics. Students read, analyze, and discuss authentic texts by established writers from the lusophone world; they watch and discuss videos of interviews with writers and other prominent figures to help them acquire the linguistic skills required in academic discourse. Through exposure to written and spoken authentic materials, students learn the grammatical and lexical tools necessary to understand such materials as well as produce their own written analysis, response, and commentary. In addition, they acquire knowledge on major Brazilian authors and works.

LACS 21001 (SOSC 21001; HIST 29304; LLSO 21001; CHST 21001; HMRT 21001; CRES 21001; DEMS 21001)
Susan Gzesh
MW 4:30 – 5:50 PM

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

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 21200 (KREY 21200)
Gerdine Ulysse
MWF 12:30 – 1:20 PM

This advanced-level course will focus on speaking and writing skills through a wide variety of texts, audiovisual materials, and cultural experiences. We will study a wide range of Haitian cultural manifestations (e.g., visual arts, music, gastronomy). Students will also review advanced grammatical structures, write a number of essays, participate in multiple class debates, and take cultural trips to have a comprehensive learning experience with Haitian language and culture.

LACS 21900 (SPAN 21905, RDIN 21905)
Matias Spector
MW 3:00 – 4:20 PM

This course introduces students to the writing produced in Hispanic and Portuguese America during the period marked by the early processes of European colonization in the sixteenth century through the revolutionary movements that, in the nineteenth century, led to the establishment of independent nation-states across the continent. The assigned texts relate to the first encounters between Indigenous, Black, and European populations in the region, to the emergence of distinct ("New World") notions of cultural identity (along with the invention of new racial categories), and to the disputes over the meaning of nationhood that characterized the anti-colonial struggles for independence. Issues covered in this survey include the idea of texts as spaces of cultural and political conflict; the relationships between Christianization, secularization, and practices of racialization; the transatlantic slave trade; the uses of the colonial past in early nationalist projects; and the aesthetic languages through which this production was partly articulated (such as the Barroco de Indias, or "New World baroque," Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and Modernismo, among others). In addition to enhancing your knowledge of Latin American cultural history and improving your close reading and critical thinking skills, this course is designed to continue building on your linguistic competence in Spanish.

LACS 22005 (SPAN 22005; RDIN 22205)
Carlos Halaburda
TTh 9:30 – 10:50 AM

This course will survey some of the main literary and cultural tendencies in Latin America from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. We will pay special attention to their aesthetic dimensions, as well as the socio-historical and political conditions that made them possible, and in which they simultaneously intervened. Questions to be studied might include the innovations of the Modernist and avant-garde movements, fantastic literature, the novel of the so-called "Boom," cultural production associated with revolutionary movements, military dictatorships, and the Cold War, as well as new currents in literary and theatrical practices. Likewise, the course will foreground some of the following concepts relevant to the study of this production: modernity and modernization; development and neoliberalism; neo-colonialism and empire; cultural autonomy and ideas of poetic and cultural renewal; the epic vs. the novel; realism and non-verisimilitude; and performativity, among others. In addition to enhancing your knowledge of Latin American cultural history and improving your close reading and critical thinking skills, this course is designed to continue building on your linguistic competence in Spanish.

LACS 22600/32600
Alejandro Bonvecchi
M 3:00 – 5:50 PM

The aim of this course is to provide analytical tools to understand how dictatorships shaped the structure of the state and the main public policies inherited by successor democratic regimes. The study of authoritarian legacies has typically been focused on the outcomes of autocracies and the restrictions they imposed on democratic governments. But while describing these outcomes and their consequences is certainly important, it is also insufficient to explain their origin and their resilience. Building on the recent literature on authoritarian politics, and focusing on the cases of the military dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil and Chile, this course explores how the institutions and dynamics of autocracies built their legacies by generating and destroying state capacities, consolidating and abandoning public policies. Guided by the works of Michael Albertus, Barbara Geddes, Erica Frantz, Anne Meng, Paul Schuler and Milan Svolik, the course will analyze how the sociological nature of autocratic coalitions and the balance of power amongst their factions informed the institutional design of dictatorships, shaped their state capacities, and determined the course of their policies. It will thus account not only for the legacies they inherited to democracies but also for the cross-country differences in their reach and their resilience.

LACS 24001 (ANTH 24001; HIST 24001; RDIN 24001; SOSC 24001)
Adam Green
TTh 11:00 – 12:20 PM

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 25540 (ENGL 25540)
Kaneesha Parsard
MW 3:00 – 4:20 PM

Caribbean literature is having a moment. NPR reported in 2023 that "this region has long been punching above its weight on the international literary scene." We will read Safiya Sinclair's (Jamaica/U.S.) How to Say Babylon, a memoir of self-discovery after being raised by an authoritarian father; a new translation of Mayra Santos Febres' (Puerto Rico) collection of migration poems, Boat People; Myriam Chancy's novel What Storm, What Thunder (Haiti/Canada/U.S.), set after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti; and poems from Shivanee Ramlochan (Trinidad & Tobago) and Dionne Brand (Canada/T&T). Our class will also include trips to literary events and visiting speakers.

LACS 25805 (ENGL 25805; FNDL 25805)
Edgar García
TTh 11:00 – 12:20 PM

One of the oldest and grandest stories of world creation in the native Americas, the Mayan Popol Vuh has been called "the Bible of America." It tells a story of cosmological origins and continued historical change, spanning mythic, classic, colonial, and contemporary times. In this class, we'll read this full work closely (in multiple translations, while engaging its original K'iche' Mayan language), attending to the important way in which its structure relates myth and history, or foundations and change. In this light, we'll examine its mirroring in Genesis, Odyssey, Beowulf, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Diné Bahane' to consider how epics struggle with a simultaneity of origins and historiography. In highlighting this tension between cosmos and politics, we'll examine contemporary adaptations of the Popol Vuh by Miguel Ángel Asturias, Ernesto Cardenal, Diego Rivera, Dennis Tedlock, Humberto Ak'ab'al, Xpetra Ernandex, Patricia Amlin, Gregory Nava, and Werner Herzog. As we cast the Guatemalan Popul Vuh as a contemporary work of hemispheric American literature (with North American, Latin American, Latinx, and Indigenous literary engagement), we will take into account the intellectual contribution of Central America and the diaspora of Central Americans in the U.S. today. As a capstone, we will visit the original manuscript of the Popol Vuh held at the Newberry Library in Chicago, thinking about how this story of world creation implicates us to this day. (Poetry, Fiction)

LACS 26382/36382 (GLST 26382; CEGU 26382; HIST 26317/36317; GEOG 26382; ANTH 23094; HIPS 26382)
Diana Schwartz Francisco
MW 3:00 – 4:20 PM

The quest to improve places and peoples, economic productivity, and social life has been a cornerstone of modern state-building and policymaking. Central to this effort, which we now call “development,” has been humans’ ability to tame nature and extract natural resources. This course interrogates the relationship between development and the environment by focusing on the Western Hemisphere and Latin America & the Caribbean in particular. The region provides an ideal case study for the impetus to improve societies for four reasons: 1) its centrality to the history of both natural science and capitalism, 2) its role as a laboratory for policies to tame nature and produce export commodities, 3) its ecological and cultural diversity, and 4) its location at the center of social thought about the relationship between economic development and nature. In this course, we will analyze the historical relationships are between development, natural resources, and society in Latin America from the onset of European invasion and colonialism in the fifteenth century, to state- and private-led improvement policies in the twentieth.

LACS 26383 (GLST 26383)
Callie Maidhof
MW 4:30 – 5:50 PM

Mapping Global Chicago is an interdisciplinary, collaborative research lab where students take the lead in order to brainstorm, design, and execute research projects on what makes Chicago a "global city" here in Chicago. This year's lab will focus on Chicago's growing Venezuelan community. Little more than three years after Texas governor Greg Abbott started busing asylum seekers to sanctuary cities such as Chicago, Venezuelans find themselves once again at the unenviable intersection of some of some of the most aggressive US policies, from ICE raids to the US overthrow of the Venezuelan government. With a choice of methods from across history, law, and the social sciences, students will examine the past and present of that community.

LACS 27777 (CEGU 27777; FREN 2777; PORT 27777; RDIN 27777; SIGN 27777; SPAN 27777)
Nikhita Obeegadoo and Victoria Saramago
TTr 2:00 – 3:20 PM

The environmental humanities have long been dominated by texts and theories from privileged sections of Europe and North America. How might this field be "disrupted" to make way for alternative understandings of our natural world that have always existed and yet remain on the margins of academic discourse? And if we are to focus on works from the "Global South," how do we account for its internal divisions and hierarchies, such as the oft-invisibilized archipelagoes of the Indian Ocean? In this course, we engage with works by contemporary writers and filmmakers from parts of the world usually grouped as the "Global South" (a label we will interrogate within the course), as a means of nourishing our creative and critical understandings of what it means to tell stories about the various ecologies we inhabit. What is the role of storytelling from the Global South in our perception of environmental change and in the current environmental crisis? How can novels, films, and short stories raise awareness of and emotional engagement with the racialized environmental impact of colonialism and coloniality in South Asia, Africa, and Latin America? We will explore the potential of narratives to challenge common assumptions regarding the environment, race, and power; and discuss how contemporary literature and film address the continuities between colonial pasts and the growing levels of toxicity in multiple regions of the Global South.

LACS 28498 (GNSE 20153; PBPL 28498)
Maria Bautista
TTh 11:00 – 12:20 PM

Although the inequities between men and women have diminished during the last decades, large gaps are still evident and resistant to change. Throughout this course, we will explore the origins of these disparities which are all fundamentally rooted in the patriarchal nature of society. Understanding how patriarchy came to be the dominant order requires a multidisciplinary and historical approach. The first lectures will cover debates in biology, human evolution, history and archeology that explain the deep roots and the spread of this order throughout the centuries. The next set of lectures will cover how current cultural practices and social norms facilitate the reproduction of the patriarchy and will also examine alternative ways in which societies have organized themselves where women have powerful roles or live in matriarchies. The class will also capture how women from the Global South contest this order within their societies and on their own terms. Finally, we will evaluate policies that have aimed to close the gap between men and women around the world. A central theme of the course is that to understand how to craft effective policies one needs to understand the mechanisms which created patriarchy and led it to persist. The students will offer presentations that will revise these policies from a critical perspective based on the material we covered throughout the quarter. The final lectures will include a variety of guest speakers.

LACS 28728 (HMRT 28728/38728; GLST 25256; SOCI 20652/30652)
Nicolas Torres-Echeverry
TTh 12:30 – 1:50 PM

This course addresses the question of violence in the context of contemporary Latin America. We will use the tools of sociology--and the social sciences more broadly--to better understand the kinds of violence that have arisen, how people make sense of them at different degrees of proximity, and how communities have resisted them. The course will focus on three Latin American contexts: Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina. We will analyze forms of police, military, and insurgent violence in the region, as well as the organizational infrastructure of Human Rights and state branches that respond to and help make sense of violence, alongside community forms of resistance. Academic readings, books, and movies will inform our class-based discussions. Students will walk out of the course with a deeper understanding of how violence looks and feels, and a conceptual map of the forms of resistance that have emerged across the region.

LACS 29002/39002 (HIST 29002/39002)
Mary Hicks
TTh 11:00 – 12:20 PM

Did the emancipation of millions of African-descended people from the bonds of chattel slavery-beginning with the 1791 slave rebellion in Haiti and ending with Brazilian abolition in 1888-mark the beginning of an irrevocable march towards Black freedom? Or was it merely an evolution in the continuing exploitation of Black people throughout the Americas? This course scrutinizes the complex economic, political, ideological, social, and cultural contexts that caused and were remade by emancipation. Students are asked to consider emancipation as a global historical process unconstrained by the boundaries of the modern nation-state, while exploring the reasons for and consequences of emancipation from a transnational perspective that incorporates the histories of the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa. By focusing on the ideological ambiguities and lived experiences of enslaved people, political actors, abolitionists, religious leaders, employers, and many others, this seminar will question what constitutes equality, citizenship, and freedom. Finally the course will explore what role emancipated slaves played in shaping the historical meanings and practices of modern democracy.

LACS 29299 (KREY 29300, FREN 29301)
Gerdine Ulysse
MW 3:00 – 4:20 PM

This course examines the concept of language identity (i.e., the language[s] people employ to represent themselves) in multilingual Creolophone communities, particularly in Haiti. This course also examines the relationships between language identity, learning, language use, and literacy development in these societies. By the end of the course, students will be able to explain: 1) what language identity in multilingual Creolophone community reveal about speakers and their language attitudes; 2) how context and mode of communication can impact language identity and language use; 3) literacy acquisition and achievement in Creole communities; and 4) how Creolophones' learning and literacy development are affected by language policies and ideologies. A final project will require students to design and conduct a preliminary sociolinguistic study based on students' interests in the French-Creolophone world.

Course taught in English. Knowledge of French and Kreyòl will be helpful, but not required. Students taking the course for FREN credit will read French texts in the original language and produce at least one piece of written work in the target language.

LACS 29399 (SPAN 29400)
Sergio Delgado Moya
TTh 12:30-1:50 PM

This course explores the origins and contemporary resonance of the notion of "Greater Mexico," a term that, in the words of Mexican American folklorist Américo Paredes, encapsulates "all the areas inhabited by people of Mexican culture-not only within the present limits of the Republic of Mexico but in the United States as well." We study essays, novels, poems, films, art works, museum exhibits, and social movements that have shaped the concept of a "greater Mexico" over the course of the last five decades. Course materials and readings by Paredes, Anzaldúa, Robert M. Young, Rubén Ortiz-Torres, the Electronic Disturbance Theater, Jay Lynn Gomez, Salvador Plascencia, and others.

LACS 32810 (SPAN 32810)
Larissa Brewer-Garcia
W 9:30-12:20 PM

Translation and piracy can both involve the strategic appropriation of language, knowledge, or property. This course analyzes the relationship between translation and piracy in the creation of foundational works of colonial Latin American literature. As students read texts about colonial encounters, conquests, piracy, and conversion, they will become familiar with early histories of translation in Latin America and a variety of early modern, modern, and post-colonial translation theories.

LACS 38802 (SPAN 38800)
Carlos Halaburda
M 3:00 – 5:50 PM

This seminar is an intellectual and institutional history of our disciplines, tracing their shifting configurations across time and space. We will engage with the theoretical models that have shaped our fields-Hispanic, Latin American, and Iberian Studies-from the 19th to the 21st century. Rather than approaching these traditions as a linear succession of increasingly sophisticated paradigms, we will study them as historically situated and politically inflected discourses. We will consider how these disciplines actively constructed the intellectual fields to which they belong, often in pursuit of a certain disciplinary autonomy. Our approach-a critical history of criticism-serves a dual purpose. First, the seminar provides a systematic engagement with the theoretical vocabularies that continue to shape contemporary debates. Second, we will interrogate the disciplines themselves- cultural studies, postcolonial criticism, gender and sexuality-by reflecting on the historical conditions that make them possible. Alongside these conceptual explorations, the seminar includes a practical component designed to help students navigate the demands of rigorous research and professionalization in the humanities, particularly in Iberian and Latin American Studies. We aim to bridge theoretical inquiry with the concrete challenges of academic work today.

Course taught in English and Spanish.

LACS 41031 (ANTH 41031)
Megan Sullivan
W 1:30 – 4:20 PM

This course will examine major developments in art practices from the late 1960s through the early 1980s in key site across South America. Questions and themes will include: the emergence and theorization of non-objectual and conceptual art practices in the region, the relationship between art and repressive political regimes, the establishment of new networks of exchange, and the formation of new definitions of a "Latin American art." Our goal will be both to analyze the works of art under study and to interrogate leading scholarly approaches to that material. Cases will be drawn primarily from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, with a focus on recent literature in the field, but students are welcome to work on artists from other countries in the region for their individual research projects.

LACS 41100 (SPAN 41100)
Sergio Delgado Moya
F 3:00 – 5:50 PM

This course is an overview of the avant-gardes: art and literature movements that emerged against the background - and in the aftermath - of the great social and technological transformations that followed armed conflicts in the 20th century. We study avant-garde movements that emerged in the Americas, with a particular focus on Latin America and on Latinx artists working in the United States. The course covers both historical avant-gardes (movements that emerged around the 1910s and 20s: creacionismo, Dada, futurism, Mexican muralism, and so forth) and neo-avant-garde movements active later in the century, in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s (neoconcretism, Asco, No-Grupo, CADA, etc.). Attention will be placed on the social and cultural contexts that shaped each of these movements, as well as on the web of connections and references that connects them. Materials and class discussions foreground the social and political resonance of the experimental aesthetics associated with the avant-gardes.

LACS 56205 (ANTH 56205)
Alan Kolata
T 2:00 – 4:50 PM

This graduate course examines the reciprocal production of humans/non-humans and the environment, focusing on the Andean and Amazonian regions of South America. In recent years, a flurry of new scholarship in and about this part of the world interrogates the ways that cosmopolitics (more-than-humans in political life), new ontologies (emergent ways of being or forms of existence), and broader collaborative zones of social and environmental world making disrupt familiar paradigms of human exceptionalism. This course takes up these new theoretical directions and provocations and links them to an older cannon of ethnographic and ethnological research concerning precolonial religiosities, land settlement, property regimes, and exchange networks in South America.

LACS 64400 (SSAD 64400; SPAN 20306)
Veronica Moraga Guerra
T 9:30 – 12:20 PM

Social Work students will strengthen their knowledge of the Spanish language, especially the vocabulary and functions relevant to clinical social work practice. In addition, they will develop greater cultural competence concerning the Latinx community, enabling them to function pragmatically appropriately in a range of contexts. The course explores a variety of communicative strategies to adapt phonetics, register, and diction to rhetorical situations commonly encountered by clinical social work professionals. It also provides cultural instruction through a variety of readings and participation in hands-on, authentic activities.