49 courses with the subject LAS, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
LAS 140Introduction to Latin America: Social Sciences
This course introduces students to Latin American Studies via disciplinary approaches from the Social Sciences, including Sociology, Anthropology, Political Sciences, and Economics. It explores the formation and development of Latin American and Caribbean societies by looking at a number of topics, including the conquest of Amerindian civilizations, colonialism, neocolonialism, nationalism, revolution, modernization, social movements, democracy, and neoliberal globalization.
This course introduces students to the range of issues and analytical approaches that form the foundation of Latinx studies. By tracing the history of the “Latina/o or Latinx¿? concept in relation to key elements of sociocultural life, such as time, space, identity, community, power, language, nation, and rights, students develop understandings of the particular ways in which Latina/o and Latinx studies takes shape as an intellectual and political enterprise.
LAS 147Introduction to Latin America: Cultural Studies
One of the LAS First-Year Seminars: FYS 133-2, FYS 199-2, FYS 199-3 One 200-level course chosen from LAS 220, LAS 222, LAS 228, LAS/Hist 261, LAS/Soc 262, LAS 263/Hist 262, LAS 268 One 300- or 400-level course chosen from LAS 300, LAS 322, LAS/SOC 331, LAS/Hist 361 Elective Courses (select three of the following):
LAS 214Latin American Economic History and Development
Intensive examination of Latin America, using the framework of economic analysis and political economy to consider economic history, growth, and development. Economic theory provides the primary paradigm within which this region is studied, but consideration is also given to historical events that conditioned the economic outcomes. Reviews the pertinent theory and focuses on application of that theory to specific historical events.
Historical survey of philosophy in the Americas, highlighting authors from various eras. Students will be exposed to ideas in all branches of philosophy, discussing metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics through the study of philosophical ideas from various sources, including indigenous, enslaved, and female authors. This course of study questions geographical and disciplinary boundaries, including the very idea of Latin America, itself. PHIL 215 and LAS 215 are cross-listed.
LAS 222Bridging the Borders: U.S. Latina and Latin American Women Writers
This course will explore the identity and the condition of women in Latin America and the United States. Latina and Latin American-women writers have illustrated women’s lives and experiences through their works and criticism. Their works have created women’s’ identities primarily from a borderline perspective, and sometimes from what Gloria Anzaldúa or Mary Louise Pratt refer to as a third space. For writers, the concept of space, gender, race, and class--as well as intersections and borderlands--play an important role when depicting Latin American women’s’ representation and Latina women in the United States and their experiences. We will use a comparative analysis utilizing texts from Latina and
Study of the evolution of the Caribbean people from colonial to post-colonial times through careful reading of literature. Course includes novels from the English, Spanish, and French Caribbean. A small and accessible body of post-colonial theory supplements the works of fiction. Focus is on the different political, economic, and cultural realities imposed on the various islands and their populations by the respective colonizing powers. AFS 236 and LAS 223 are cross-listed.
LAS 231/WGS 231/ANTH 231 Gender and Change in Africa and Afro-Latin America LAS/Anth 232 Precolumbian Civilizations of Mesoamerica LAS/Anth 236 Precolumbian Civilizations of South America LAS/MUS/AFS 251 Topics in Musicology: Global-Music of the Caribbean LAS/Hist 261 Colonial Latin American History LAS/Soc 262 Social Development of Latin America
LAS 231Gender and Change in Africa and Afro-Latin America
An exploration of the diversity of women's familial, political, economic and social realities and experiences in West Africa and the African Diaspora in South America and the Caribbean. Particular attention is given to the processes by which indigenous West African gender and cultural patterns and their inherent power relations have shifted since pre-colonial times and across the Atlantic into the New World. Finally, the course examines the concept of Diaspora and theories relative to processes of cultural change, resistance, and retentions, as well as the role gender plays in these processes. No prerequisites. ANTH 231, WGS 231 and LAS 231 are cross-listed.
Introduction to the organization and development of Native American civilizations in Mexico and Central America. Evidence from archaeological and ethnographic research, Native texts and art, and Spanish Colonial writings is used to study religious beliefs, sociopolitical organization, economic relationships, and intellectual achievements of such groups as the Olmec, Maya, and Aztecs. Period prior to the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest is emphasized, but modern indigenous cultures are also studied. Prerequisites: Anthropology 103 or 106; or Latin American Studies 140 or 147. Anth 232 and LAS 232 are cross-listed.
LAS 236Precolumbian Civilizations of South America
Introduction to the organization and development of Native American civilizations in South America. Evidence from archaeological and ethnographic research, Native texts and art, and Spanish Colonial writings is used to study religious beliefs, sociopolitical organization, economic relationships, and intellectual achievements of such groups as the Inka, Moche, and Chavin. Period prior to the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest is emphasized, but modern indigenous cultures are also studied. Prerequisites: Anthropology 103 or 106; or Latin American Studies 140 or 147. Anth 236 and LAS 236 are cross-listed.
An examination of music in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Trinidad. Disciplinary perspectives come from ethnomusicology (the study of music as culture), Africana Studies, and Latin American Studies. Covers recreational musics (such as reggae and salsa) as well as religious musics (such as bata drumming) in relation to broader cultural currents such as national identity, race, social class, gender, sexuality, and religion. MUS 251, AFS 251, and LAS 251 are cross-listed.
Exploration of Spanish and Portuguese America from its roots in Iberia and indigenous America through three centuries of change. During the period, Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans transformed their economies and cultures and created new societies. Hist 261 and LAS 261 are cross-listed. Offered every other year.
A study of the development of Latin American states and societies. It first examines the various strategies employed by Latin American elites to develop capitalist societies that serve their interests. Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina are used to illustrate the implementation of these strategies. The second part of the course focuses on social movements to analyze the popular reaction to elites’ strategies of social development. It looks at social movements generally in the region, but it pays particular attention to Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. Soc 262 and LAS 262 are cross-listed.
LAS 264Brazil: Earthly Paradise to Industrial Giant
Major themes in Brazilian history from early Portuguese-indigenous relations, expanding frontiers, colonial society, and the development of African slavery, through nineteenth-century formation of national identity, to twentieth-century industrialization, political struggle, and cultural change. Hist 264 and LAS 264 are cross-listed. Offered as staffing permits.
The study of selected masterpieces of Latino literature from the United States. Special emphasis is given to writers representing the largest segments of the U.S. Latino population: Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Dominicans. Other Latino communities are represented in shorter reading selections. This is primarily a literature course engaging students in literary analysis of each text’s themes, structure and style. ENG 265 and LAS 265 are cross-listed. Fulfills humanities and conceptualizing diversity requirements..
This course introduces students to the major canons of Latinx literature that emerged in the twentieth century, together with their historical contexts from the nineteenth century to the present. Students will analyze novels, short stories, poems, and films to investigate how Latinx cultural production unfolds along the lines of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and coloniality. As we will see, these issues are explored not only in literary expressions of Latinidad and Chicanidad, but also, and more predominantly, in group-specific epistemologies and modes of consciousness, inextricable from the experiences that co-constitute them, i.e., from the social and historical complexities of racialization and mestizaje; multilingualism and code-switching; immigration and diaspora; revolution and exile; citizenship and undocumented status; labor and economic exploitation. Along the way, students will examine the differences and similarities that have shaped the experiences and aesthetic choices of different Latinx communities in the United States, while thinking more broadly about their transnational contexts in the US-Mexico borderlands, the circum-Caribbean, and Latin America. ENG 266 and LAS 266 are cross-listed.
A study of historical, social and political development of the Dominican Republic. The course looks at the tensions between dictatorship, democracy, social development, and international migration to explain contemporary Dominican society. These factors are seen in the context of international capitalist development and the nation’s re-insertion into globalization. Soc 267 and LAS 267 are cross-listed.
LAS 276Social and Political Problems: The Case of Mexico
Study of the development of Mexico’s economic and social development in the Twentieth Century. The course focuses on two tasks: it provides an outline of economic and social development since independence and evaluates the process of industrialization in the twentieth century. The basic conceptual framework is that a socio-historical approach may help us understand the successive periods of growth and stagnation in Mexican society. What does the sociological analysis teach us about the current obstacles to social and economic development?
Investigation of Latin American movies that urge revolutionary change. Special attention to films of the Cuban Revolution and to underground cinema, neorealist films, and indigenous film movements in other Latin American countries. Attention to the social and political context in which the films were made. Analysis of the contrasting presuppositions and assertions in revolutionary filmmakers’ theoretical writings, of the impact of their theories on their films, and of the evolution of revolutionary movies.
Study of the Hispanic experience in the territory that is now the United States, from the early Spanish explorations to the present. This course examines the historical roots of the various groups that belong to this large and diverse segment of the U.S. population, looking at the issues that distinguish each group, as well as those that join all the groups under the Hispanic umbrella. Readings, films, guest speakers, and contact with the local Hispanic community provide sources of information for reflection on the ways in which the various groups have faced the challenges of integration into American society.
A study of the changing pattern of democratic development in Latina America. It will first analyze the processes of transition and consolidation of the region’s democracies from the 1980s to 2009 and, then, focus, on issues of clientelism, citizenship, and populism. What is holding back the consolidation of democracy in the region? Prerequisite: LAS 140 or any other course with a focus on Latin America. Soc 331 and LAS 331 are cross-listed.
Explores geographical regions from the Great Lakes to the South American pampas beyond the effective control of Spanish, Portuguese, British, or French empires or early nation states. Often transitional environmental zones, ecological and human variables shaped these spaces of ethnic, cultural, and economic exchange, where competing spheres of indigenous and European influence overlapped. The histories of these places have often been memorialized and mythologized in the development of national identities. Offered as staffing permits.
Study of the background, precursor movements, participants, events, and outcome of the violent social revolution; that swept the Mexican countryside between 1910 and 1917. Hist 361 and LAS 361 are cross-listed. Offered every other year.
LAS 363The Other America: Transnational and Hemispheric American Studies
Students in this course will examine U.S., Caribbean, and Latin American literature in a comparative and interdisciplinary context. Beginning in the late-nineteenth century and moving through more contemporary voices, we will read novels, poems, and critical works that address the historical and cultural relationship between the American North and South, i.e., between global geographies that have been divided into core and peripheral zones. The concept of the 'Western hemisphere' gained cohesion through the displacement and erasure of indigenous populations across the global South. We will therefore assess how the recovery of knowledge, history, and freedom remains central to literary works that mobilize a hemispheric imagination. Students will explore how imperialism, racialism, polyculturalism, and multilingualism not only shaped cultural production in the Americas but also provided a shared experience of loss and fragmentation that becomes the object of modernist representation across national divides. Moreover, students will examine the literary devices and narrative structures that constitute cross-regional anxieties concerning historical origins, geography, chronology, and memory across the continent. In addition to primary texts, we will engage criticism across the fields of Atlantic, borderlands, and diaspora studies to identify and understand key concepts that span the fraught yet emerging field of transnational American literature.
Intensive study of Brazilian history with an emphasis on the creation of social difference, the formation of concepts of race and ethnicity, and the construction of colonial, imperial, and national identities. Exploring historiographical trends and recent scholarship, the course emphasizes topics such as early contact, colonial society, Indian and African slavery, immigration, religion and culture, and indigenism. Hist 364 and LAS 364 are cross-listed. Offered as staffing permits.
This course explores magical realism as an international literary artform that combines supernatural phenomena with realistic representations of everyday life. This fusion of fact and fantasy originated by questioning not only the nature of reality but also the possibility of creating new realities amid historic struggles for national autonomy in the global South. As such, magical realism can be understood as a literary expression of postcolonial thought that adopts yet transforms Western modernism to assert the innovation, authority, and importance of non-Western modernisms. The first one-third of the course will cover the foundations of magical realism as a set of Latin American modes and worldviews. As such, it will feature readings by Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Julio Cortázar, and Jorge Luis Borges. Other parts of the course will trace the expansion and propagation of magical realism across other geographies and identities around the world. In these sections, we will read texts by Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Moshid Hamin, Ben Okri, and Jeanette Winterson—from Native American and African American authors in the US to authors in Pakistan, Nigeria, and England. Students will have an opportunity to bring these texts, together with secondary sources, into comparative dialogue with films such as Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labryinth and Issa López’s Tigers Are Not Afraid, among others, to note the cross-cultural connections between magical realism and expressions of loss, trauma, resistance, and renewal. As we encounter these works, we will explore questions such as: What are the literary strategies and narrative techniques used to naturalize the supernatural? How has this mode changed in moving from Latin American contexts to other cultures around the world? What myths and oral traditions influence what some critics have called the “ontological foundations” of magical realism, and what forms of irreverence and metafiction inform the more “epistemological foundations” of the mode? ENG 365 and LAS 365 cross-listed.
Spanish Department Course Options Core Courses (required of all Spanish/LACLS majors): Span 301 or 302 (Heritage Learners) Spanish Composition and Conversation Students who demonstrate an exceptional command of the Spanish language may petition the department to be exempted from this requirement. Span 305 The Pleasure of the Text Elective Courses (select four of the following): Span 351 Poetry and Song in the Hispanic World Span 354 The Nineteenth-Century Hispanic World Span 355 Hispanic Theater Span 370 Becoming Latina/o and Chicana/o in Latino Literature Span 376 Latin American Contemporary Prose Span 378 Contemporary Literature of the Hispanic Caribbean Span 379 Colonialism, the Atlantic World and Latin America Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies/Spanish Courses
Summer Internship graded S/U, counting in the minimum requirements for a major or minor only with written permission filed in the Registrar's Office. Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies Program Description and Requirements To minor in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies, students must fulfill the College's language distribution requirement in Spanish or one of the other principal languages spoken in Latin America. Students on the alternate-language track may also minor in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies. Requirements: To minor in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies, students must fulfill the College's language distribution requirement in Spanish, or one of the other principal languages spoken in Latin America. Students must take six courses from the combined major course offerings: No more than two may be at the 100 level At least one must be a 300 LAS course taken at the College. Minors are strongly encouraged to take LAS 140, LAS 145, or LAS 147. Courses must be in at least two of the College's divisions -- i.e., the courses must draw on both humanities and the social sciences. Students on the alternate-language track may also minor in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies. Study Abroad: A maximum of two courses taken on a study abroad program in Latin America may be substituted for any course except the 300 or 400-level LAS course. Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies Course Options: Core Courses (required of all LACLS/Spanish majors): One 100-level course chosen from the following:
