LALS

The United States government has spent tens of billions of dollars on policies aimed at reducing the flow of

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This interdisciplinary survey course offered in two sections (Portuguese and English) will provide additional exposure to the language and culture of the Portuguese speaking countries (including Brazil, Portugal and its ex-colonies in Africa), and students will broaden their knowledge by complementing the classroom discussions with the experience of visiting historic and cultural sites in Minas Gerais, Brazil. The history of Portuguese colonization and its influence, and current discussions about contemporary challenges will be incorporated in this course as a way to familiarize students with key issues, such as the influence of African and Indigenous culture in Brazil's language, art, culture, and racial relations in Portugal and the Portuguese ex-colonies in Africa. At the end of this course, students will recognize and discuss important themes, historical figures and cultural characteristics of the Portuguese speaking countries. This course is a Penn Global Seminar, which includes a travel component. An application is required. For more information and to apply, visit: https://global.upenn.edu/pennabroad/pgs Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: PRTG 0018 Mutually Exclusive: PRTG 1810 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course examines the role of food in linguistic expression, literature, and cultural identity across Afro-Luso-Brazilian traditions. Through the analysis of texts, films, and linguistic practices from Brazil, Portugal, Angola, Cabo Verde, and Mozambique, students will explore how food serves as a powerful lens to reflect and understand social identities, as well as aspects of the historical and political dynamics of these Portuguese-speaking countries. This course is taught in English. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: PRTG 0019 Mutually Exclusive: PRTG 1910 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This seminar compares a set of practices that center on coca leaf production in indigenous communities, where coca cultivation has been sustained over long centuries, on the one hand, with a set of unsustainable practices linked to the “drug war” in the Americas, on the other. Participants will read scholarly work in history and anthropology, support one another through a research process, and explore what historians and other scholars might contribute to discussions about drug policy. First-year students only.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This interdisciplinary course exposes students to the three dimensions of sustainable development -environmental, economic, and social- through an examination of three products -peyote, coca, and coffee- that are crucial in shaping modern identity in areas of Latin America. The course integrates this analysis of sustainable development in relation to cultural sustainability and cultural practices associated with peyote, coca, and coffee and their rich, traditional heritage and place in literature, film, and the arts. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ANTH 0091, ENVS 0053, SPAN 0091 Mutually Exclusive: SPAN 3910 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course explores the involvement of the Latinx environmental justice movement since the 1960s. It addresses theories and concepts of environmental racism and environmental justice, underscoring how Latinx have challenged, expanded, and contributed to the environmental justice discourse. In this course, students will explore national case studies of environmental and racial injustice as they bear on Latinx communities both in rural areas and in urban barrios throughout the United States. The course will analyze these case studies through the lens of Latinx artistic and literary texts (essays, paintings, short stories documentaries, and short films) as they provide a unique historic and multicultural perspective of the Latinx experience with environmental injustice and of how Latinxs imagine alternative transitions and responses to environmental marginalization. In addition, the works of Latinx artists and writers will serve as case studies to deconstruct racial stereotypes of Latinxs as unconcerned about environmental issues, shedding light on how they share a broad engagement with environmental ideas. The case studies analyzed in this course emphasize race and class differences between farmworkers and urban barrio residents and how they affect their respective struggles. The unit on farmworkers will focus on workplace health issues such as toxic chemicals and collective bargaining contracts. The unit on urban barrios will focus on gentrification, affordable housing, and toxic substances in the home. We will also review current and past programs that have been organized to address the aforementioned problems. This is an Academically Based Community Service Course (ABCS course) through which students will learn from and provide support to a Latinx-serving organization in the City of Philadelphia on preventing exposure to hazardous substances, thus bridging the information gap on environmental justice issues in the Latinx community in Philadelphia. Information dissemination and education efforts will be conducted by collaborating with Esperanza Academy Charter School in Philadelphia to implement lessons on preventing exposure to hazardous substances. Studying environmental justice and pairing it with community service will heighten students' awareness of the complexities of culture, race, gender, and class while providing them with an invaluable experience of cross- cultural understanding.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course focuses on immigrant, migrant, and refugee communities in United States cities and suburbs. We survey migration and community experiences among a broad range of racial and ethnic groups in different city and suburban neighborhoods. Class readings, discussions, regular trips, and assignments explore topics including labor markets, commerce, housing, community organizations, social movements, race and ethnic relations, neighborhood change, refugee resettlement, and transnational communities. The class introduces students to a variety of social science approaches to studying cities and communities, including readings in sociology, geography, anthropology, social history, and political science.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

The colonial period (1492- 1800) saw huge population movements (many of them involuntary) within the Americas and across the Atlantic. As a result, Latin America was created from the entanglement of technologies, institutions, knowledge systems, and cosmologies from Indigenous, European, and African cultures. We will learn about colonial institutions such as slavery and encomienda. We will also explore the different strategies pursued by individuals and communities to build meaningful lives in the face of often dire social and environmental circumstances. Class readings are primary sources and the focus of discussions, papers, and exams will be their interpretation.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course examines central themes of Latin American history, from independence to the present. It engages a hemispheric and global approach to understand the economic and social transformations of the region. We will explore the anti-imperial struggles, revolutions, social movements, and global economic crises that have given rise to new national projects for development, or have frustrated the realization of such goals. Taking a historical perspective, we will ask: What triggers imperial breakdown? How did slaves navigate the boundary between freedom and bondage? Was the Mexican Revolution revolutionary? How did the Great Depression lead to the rise of state-led development? In what ways have citizens mobilized for equality, a decent standard of living, and cultural inclusion? And what future paths will the region take given uneasy export markets and current political uncertainty?

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This interdisciplinary seminar examines, from an international perspective, theory and artistic productions, including literature, films, and performance art, that analyze and critique capitalism, imperialism and (neo)colonialism, racism, and patriarchy. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: COML 0520, ENGL 0520 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

1450-1800 The purpose of this course is to provide students with a solid knowledge of Atlantic history during the early modern period (XV-XVIII centuries). Through readings of primary and secondary texts we will discuss the cultural, religious, intellectual, and economic developments of Europe, Africa, and the Americas, as well as the connections, struggles, and mutual influences between the peoples of these three continents. Throughout the semester we will study several important topics: medieval precedents of early modern expansion; theories of empire; ideologies and systems of conquest and colonialization; the relevance of race and slavery to the understanding of the early modern Atlantic world; how different peoples perceived others and themselves; how European imperialism and colonialization affected the internal development of Africa and America; the role played by religion in the Atlantic world; persistence and continuity of Native cultures and beliefs during an age of expansion; the creation of new identities; the role played by African nations in the creation of the Atlantic world; and the creation of an Atlantic economy. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: HIST 0600 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Designed to introduce students to the interdisciplinary field of Latin American and Latinx Studies, this is a seminar oriented toward first and second year students. Readings will range widely, from scholarly work on the colonial world that followed from and pushed back against the "conquest"; to literary and artistic explorations of Latin American identities; to social scientists' explorations of how Latinxs are changing the United States in the current generation.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

The course will focus on race and ethnicity in the United States. We begin with a brief history of racial categorization and immigration to the U.S. The course continues by examining a number of topics including racial and ethnic identity, interracial and interethnic friendships and marriage, racial attitudes, mass media images, residential segregation, educational stratification, and labor market outcomes. The course will include discussions of African Americans, Whites, Hispanics, Asian Americans and multiracials.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course is a comprehensive introduction to the sociological study of urban areas. This includes more general topics as the rise of cities and theories urbanism, as well as more specific areas of inquiry, including American urbanism, segregation, urban poverty, suburbanization and sprawl, neighborhoods and crime, and immigrant ghettos. The course will also devote significant attention to globalization and the process of urbanization in less developed counties. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: AFRC 1090, SOCI 1090, URBS 1090 1 Course Unit University of Pennsylvania Catalog 2163

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Beneath the daily headlines about refugees blocked entry, and undocumented migrants deported there is a set of hard questions which deserve closer attention: Should countries have borders? If countries have borders, how should they decide who is kept out and who is allowed in? How many immigrants is 'enough'? Are immigrants equally desirable? What kinds of obligations do immigrants have to their receiving society? What kinds of obligations do host societies have to immigrants? Should there be 'pathways' to citizenship? Can citizenship be earned? Should citizenship be automatic? This course explores these and other dilemmas raised by immigration. Spring, even numbered years only Also Offered As: PSCI 1103 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course examines the dynamics of political and economic change in twentieth century Latin America, with the goal of achieving an understanding of contemporary politics in the region. We will analyze topics such as the incorporation of the region to the international economy and the consolidation of oligarchic states (1880s to 1930s), corporatism, populism, and elict pacts (1930s and 1940s), social revolution, democratic breakdown, and military rule (1960s and 1970s), transitions to democracy and human rights advocacy (1980s), makret- oriented reforms (1990s), and the turn to the left of current governments (2000s). The course will draw primarily from the experiences of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Mexico. No prior knowledge of the region is required.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Why has the United States government participated in regime change in Latin America? How have these interventions affected Latin American political and economic outcomes? How have they helped or hurt U.S. interests in the region? This lecture course provides an introduction to the history and politics of U.S. participation in regime change in Latin America since 1949. For each event, the course will help students understand (1) the goals of the U.S. government; (2) the historical and political context of the intervention; and (3) the outcomes and consequences, both in Latin America and for the United States. One set of short writing assignments will train students to identify the main argument of a reading and assess the quality of the evidence presented in support of that argument; a second set of short writing assignments will train students to make and defend their own argument (see draft syllabus for details). Spring, even numbered years only Also Offered As: PSCI 1121 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course offers anthropological perspectives on the Caribbean as a geo-political and socio-cultural region, and on contemporary Caribbean diaspora cultures. We will examine how the region's long and diverse colonial history has structured relationships between race, ethnicity, class, gender and power, as well as how people have challenged these structures. As a region in which there have been massive transplantations of peoples and their cultures from Africa, Asia, and Europe, and upon which the United States has exerted considerable influence, we will question the processes by which the meeting and mixing of peoples and cultures has occurred. Course readings include material on the political economy of slavery and the plantation system, family and community life, religious beliefs and practices, gender roles and ideologies, popular culture, and the differing ways national, ethnic, and racial identities are expressed on the islands and throughout the Caribbean diaspora. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: AFRC 1160, ANTH 1160 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course offers an international and multidisciplinary tour of revolutionary art from the 20th and 21st centuries, including cinema, literature, visual art, theater, and performance art. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. Also Offered As: CIMS 1280, COML 1180, ENGL 1180, GSWS 1180, THAR 1180 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This class examines the emergence of the U.S. as a world power since 1898, and considers both the international and domestic consequences of U.S. foreign relations. In one respect, the twentieth century was a strange time to become a global empire: it was the period when colonial systems centered in Europe, Russia, Japan, and Turkey collapsed, and new nations emerged throughout Africa and Asia. This class explores the changing strategies of military, economic, and political intervention that the US pursued as colonization lost legitimacy. Within that framework, the class invites students to think about four questions: How did the idea and practice of empire change over the twentieth century? How did the United States and people within the US relate to new visions of independence emerging in Africa, Asia, and Latin America? How did global interactions both inform and reflect racial ideology in the United States? Finally, how did anti-imperialist arguments and movements change over the twentieth century?

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course examines U.S. literature and culture in the context of the global history of the Americas. Historical moments informing the course will range from the origins of the Caribbean slave-and-sugar trade at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and the U.S.-Mexico and Spanish-American wars. Readings will include works by authors such as Frances Calderon de la Barca, Frederick Douglass, Helen Hunt Jackson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Jose Marti, Herman Melville, John Rollin Ridge, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, and Felix Varela. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ENGL 1120 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

The Inca created a vast and powerful South American empire in the high Andes Mountains that was finally conquered by Spain. Using Penn's impressive museum collections and other archaeological, linguistic, and historical sources, this course will examine Inca religion and worldview, architecture, sacred temples, the capital of Cuzco, ritual calendar, ceque system, textiles, metalworking, economic policies and expansionist politics from the dual perspectives of Inca rulers and their subjects. Our task is to explain the rise, dominance, and fall of the Incas as a major South American civilization. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ANTH 1254 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course offers a broad introduction to the study of Latinx culture. We will examine literature, theater, visual art, and popular cultural forms, including murals, poster art, graffiti, guerrilla urban interventions, novels, poetry, short stories, and film. In each instance, we will study this work within its historical context and with close attention to the ways it illuminates class formation, racialization, and ideologies of gender and sexuality as they shape Latinx experience in the U.S. Topics addressed in the course will include immigration and border policy, revolutionary nationalism and its critique, anti-imperialist thought, Latinx feminisms, queer latinidades, ideology, identity formation, and social movements. While we will address key texts, historical events, and intellectual currents from the late 19th century and early 20th century, the course will focus primarily on literature and art from the 1960s to the present. All texts will be in English. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ARTH 2679, COML 1260, ENGL 1260, GSWS 1260 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course explores the complex and fruitful relationship between literature and the visual arts, including painting, sculpture, installations, and performance art. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ARTH 2990, CIMS 1261, COML 1261, ENGL 1261, THAR 1261 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course examines the role of race and ethnicity in the political discourse through a comparative survey of recent literature on the historical and contemporary political experiences of the four major minority groups (Blacks or African Americans, American Indians, Latinos or Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans). A few of the key topics will include assimilation and acculturation seen in the Asian American community, understanding the political direction of Black America in a pre and post Civil Rights era, and assessing the emergence of Hispanics as the largest minority group and the political impact of this demographic change. Throughout the semester, the course will introduce students to significant minority legislation, political behavior, social movements, litigation/court rulings, media, and various forms of public opinion that have shaped the history of racial and ethnic minority relations in this country. Readings are drawn from books and articles written by contemporary political scientists. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: PSCI 1290 1 Course Unit University of Pennsylvania Catalog 2165

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course focuses on the history of selected African societies from the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. The primary goal is to study the political, economic, social, and cultural history of a number of peoples who participated in the Atlantic slave trade or were touched by it during the era of their involvement. The course is designed to serve as an introduction to the history and culture of African peoples who entered the diaspora during the era of the slave trade. Its audience is students interested in the history of Africa, the African diaspora, and the Atlantic world, as well as those who want to learn about the history of the slave trade. Case studies will include the Yoruba, Akan, and Fon, as well as Senegambian and West-central African peoples.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Portuguese for the Professions is designed for advanced-level students to develop their ability to use a wide technical vocabulary. The course will cover an array of topics in the areas of Economy, Politics, Science, Technology, Law and others as they pertain to the societies and cultures of the Lusophone countries, with particular emphasis placed on Brazil. Through readings, movies, discussions, essays and presentations, students will enhance their ability to write about and discuss these topics while employing the appropriate technical vocabulary.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Portuguese for the Professions II is a second-semester course designed to provide advanced-level students with exposure to, and practice in, a wide variety of technical vocabulary, and to develop their communicative skills on topics related to Brazil's economic, social and historical context. Classroom activities will be based on the readings and discussions of articles, papers, the viewing of documentaries and other visual media, covering an array of topics within the proposed themes. The course will be conducted in Portuguese.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

present Precious metals have shaped pre-Colombian economies and socio- cultural processes in the Americas for thousands of years. After 1492, gold and silver sent from the "New World" to the "Old World" played a key role in changing economies all over the world. Locally, mining centers were places marked by forced labor, conspicuous consumption, and the destruction of ecosystems. Internationally, gold and silver prices have long had outsized effects on monetary and trade policies. This course uses case studies to delve into the fascinating history of precious metals and mining in North and South America. We will analyze documents describing the gold objects ransacked by Spanish conquistadors, examine 17th Century proto-industrial silver mining at Potosi, trace the impact and human cost of the huge gold strikes in Minas Gerais, in colonial Brazil, read new work on the California and Yukon moments of "rush" and their long-term impact on US monetary policy, and follow new reports about the conflicts at the heart of transnational gold mining in the present. Students will gain experience working with primary sources and will produce an in-depth research paper.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

In the past decade, Brazil has emerged a leading global power. As the world's fifth-largest country, by size and population, and the ninth-largest by GDP, Brazil exerts tremendous influence on international politics and the global economy, seen in its position as an emerging BRIC nation and a regional heavyweight in South America. Brazil is often in the news for its strides in social welfare, leading investments in the Global South, as host of the World Cup and Olympics, and, most recently, for its political instability. It is also a nation of deep contradictions, in which myth of racial democracy -- the longstanding creed that Brazilian society has escaped racial discrimination -- functions alongside pervasive social inequality, state violence, political corruption, and an unforgiving penal system. This course examines six centuries of Brazilian history. It highlights the interplay between global events -- colonialism, slavery and emancipation, capitalism, and democratization -- and the local geographies, popular cultures, and social movements that have shaped this multi-ethnic and expansive nation. In particular, the readings will highlight Brazil's place in Latin America and the Lusophone World, as well as the ways in which Brazil stands as a counterpoint to the United States, especially in terms of the legacy of slavery and race relation. In this lecture, we will also follow the current political and economic crises unfolding in Brazil, at a moment when it has become all the more important to evaluate just how South America's largest nation has shaped and been shaped by global events. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: AFRC 1475, HIST 1475 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course will provide students with a solid knowledge of the history of early modern Spain (1450-1700). Through readings of primary and secondary texts that offer a complex vision of the cultural, religious, intellectual, and economic contexts and processes, students will be able to appreciate the intricacies of Spain's historical evolution. The course focuses on the rise and decline of the Spanish monarchy: the conditions that enabled Spain to become the most powerful monarchy in early modern times, and the conditions that led to its decline. This course also touches upon other important aspects critical to understanding early modern Spain: relationships among Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Iberian Peninsula; the conquest and colonization of the New World; and early modern debates about Spain's rights to occupy America and the so- called "destruction of the Indies."

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This class examines the global ramifications of the era of Atlantic revolutions from the 1770s through the 1820s. With a particular focus on French Saint Domingue and Latin America, it provides an overview of key events and individuals from the period. Along the way, it assesses the impact of the American and French revolutions on the breakdown of colonial regimes across the Americas. Students will learn how to think critically about citizenship, constitutional power, and independence movements throughout the Atlantic world. Slavery and the transatlantic slave trade were seriously challenged in places such as Haiti, and the class investigates the appropriation and circulation of revolutionary ideas by enslaved people and other subaltern groups. Also Offered As: AFRC 1625, HIST 1625 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This class examines the cultural and social ramifications of the African diaspora on a global level. It is divided into two major sections. The first section provides the historical background to the African diaspora by focusing on the forced migration of Africans to Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas. We will then delve into the black experience in French and British colonial spaces. In this section, we will also endeavor to move beyond the Atlantic-centric paradigm in studies of the African diaspora by examining free and unfree migrations of African people across the Indian Ocean to places as far away as India and the Philippines. The second half of the class devotes significant attention to the historical legacy of slavery and colonialism in places like Brazil, Cuba and the United States. In this section, we will discuss such issues as race relations, the struggle for civil rights for African-descent people as well as the emergence and the implementation of affirmative action policies in places like Brazil and the US.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course is designed to provide advanced-level students with additional exposure to Portuguese language and culture, as they broaden their knowledge of the Lusophone world and its identity. Classes will focus on discussions and students presentations based on articles, literary texts, and movies or documentaries from, and about, the different regions of the world where Portuguese is spoken. We will start with Portugal and Brazil, and end with Angola and Mozambique, and their cultural expressions. A series of important themes related to the Lusophone world, its history, the dialogues among its different countries, and contemporary challenges will be incorporated in this course as a way to familiarize students with key themes. At the end of this course, students should 1) have developed their oral and written expressions in Portuguese, at the advanced-level, and 2) be able to recognize and discuss important themes, historical figures, and cultural characteristics of the Lusophone world. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: PRTG 1800 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Prerequisite

PRTG 1000

This interdisciplinary survey course offered in two sections (Portuguese and English) will provide additional exposure to the language and culture of the Portuguese speaking countries (including Brazil, Portugal and its ex-colonies in Africa), and students will broaden their knowledge by complementing the classroom discussions with the experience of visiting historic and cultural sites in Minas Gerais, Brazil. This 1000- level course fulfills the following requirements: 1) advanced language course for students in the Huntsman Program in the Portuguese track, 2) course towards the major or minor in LALS, and 3) the Portuguese certificate. The history of Portuguese colonization and its influence, and current discussions about contemporary challenges will be incorporated in this course as a way to familiarize students with key issues, such as the influence of African and Indigenous culture in Brazil's language, art, culture, and racial relations in Portugal and the Portuguese ex-colonies in Africa. At the end of this course, students will recognize and discuss important themes, historical figures and cultural characteristics of the Portuguese speaking countries. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: PRTG 1810 Mutually Exclusive: PRTG 0018 1 Course Unit University of Pennsylvania Catalog 2167

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course explores aspects of Luso-Brazilian culture and film in light of its social context and reception. For current course content, please see department's webpage: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/hispanic- portuguese-studies/pc.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course examines the role of food in linguistic expression, literature, and cultural identity across Afro-Luso-Brazilian traditions. Through the analysis of texts, films, and linguistic practices from Brazil, Portugal, Angola, Cabo Verde, and Mozambique, students will explore how food serves as a powerful lens to reflect and understand social identities, as well as aspects of the historical and political dynamics of these Portuguese-speaking countries. This course will be taught in Portuguese. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: PRTG 1910 Mutually Exclusive: PRTG 0019 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

In a time of abundant fake news and mis-information, it becomes ever important for students (for all, really!) to learn how to critically assess (and produce) robust empirical evidence to uncover patterns and trends about social life. The goal of this course is to do just that through the use of census microdata, video and photographs, with a focus on social inequality! Or, in other words…a first goal of this course is to introduce students to empirical work that will let them identify robust evidence on social inequality across a diverse set of topics and countries. A second goal of the course is to provide students with key analytical skills through working with microdata to uncover social inequality globally. Having exposure and hands-on experience with the correct tools to read (and produce) evidence on patterns and trends on social research is an important skill for students in any major. We will use publicly available census microdata on more than 100 countries from IPUMS and photographs from the Dollar Street Project. Students will work with a country, produce their own analysis and combine it with photographs and videos. As a Signature Course, a third key goal of the course is to teach students skills that will enable them to more easily read empirical work and write results more clearly and concisely. Students will practice reading academic research, do class exercises, write case studies, and complete a research paper/video/photo essay that will aid them in these goals. Also Offered As: HSOC 2012, SOCI 2020, STSC 2012 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

International organizations (IOs) play a powerful role in mitigating conflict at the global level. #What role do they play in solving problems related to politics, economic development, corruption, inequality, and civil society in Latin America? How much power, influence, and control do they possess in the region? #This course examines the role and impact international organizations have had on Latin America since the mid-20th century. #After a review of theoretical perspectives on the significance of IOs in inter-American affairs, students will examine the workings, issues, and controversies surrounding IOs in Latin America across themes of democracy, human rights, security, and development - the four main pillars of the OAS. Through readings, short presentations/ debates, and guest speakers, students will explore IOs and their action in the region. Some of these IOs include the IMF, World Bank, UN, ICC as well as regional organizations and area trade blocs and agreements of USMCA/NAFTA, Mercosur, Pacific Alliance, ALBA, and other civil society and human rights organizations. A large part of the course will focus on the Organization of American States and its various departments and divisions such as the Inter American Commission for Human Rights. #Students will be invited to participate in the Washington Model OAS simulation in April.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Chile (Penn Global Seminar - PGS) This undergraduate seminar compares the evolution of relations between States and Indigenous peoples and movements throughout the Americas, with a particular focus on the Mapuche people of the Patagonia region, in the south of nowadays Argentina and Chile. The main goal of the course is to comparatively study the organization of Indigenous communities and analyze their political demands regarding plurinationality, self- determination, territory, prior consultation, living well, and intercultural education and health, as well as the different ways in which States repress, ignore, or address such demands. The course starts by reviewing what does it mean to indigenize and decolonize the academy and political science. We then focus on the controversial question of who is Indigenous and comparatively assess the legal answer to this question in different countries of the Americas. Next, we tackle the issue of research methodology and positionality of the researcher, the ethics of studying Indigenous peoples, and using in-depth interviews as a tool for social science research. After briefly reviewing some of the consequences of the conquest and colonialism, we study the topic of global Indigenous rights and politics and from there we zoom in the politics of Indigenous peoples in Argentina, and the Mapuche of Neuquén, in particular. In the last part of the course, including during our travel component, we delve into what are the main issues that Mapuche communities of Neuquén confront in the present: from territorial land claims, to interactions with extractive industries, co-management of natural resources with the National Parks Service, intercultural education, and intercultural health, among other topics. Spring, odd numbered years only Also Offered As: PSCI 2121 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This seminar explores the rise of the “dime novel” across the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. Also Offered As: ENGL 2135 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course begins with the premise of the alien: landscapes, people, artifacts, language. How and where do we experience or encounter things, people, or places that are “out of this world”? We survey a diverse range of expressive cultural material from Latina/o/x America such as travelogues, film, advertising, architecture, and artwork to question the categories of the alien, tourist, and the local. Class readings by Latinx and Latin American Studies scholars on Disneyland, cultural heritage, gentrification, and The X-Files will guide our investigation through the intersections of tourism, architecture, and the production and popularity of “alien” environments in the Americas. Class discussions and visits to local tourist attractions will engage students with everyday surroundings to interrogate how social experiences, economic, and political histories shape our understanding of the actual conditions we live in and imagine a possible world we all share. As we build a hemispheric understanding of the Americas, we will examine dominant and mainstream representations of North American citizenship. This course is organized as a thematic loop: by the end, we will return to our initial point of departure with new questions. This class aims to develop 1) critical thinking skills through collective close reading of secondary sources and seminar-style discussion of complex texts. 2) ability to engage primary and archival sources and their uses for interpreting the built environment. 3) ability to identify and describe central questions in Latinx and Latin American studies in writing through a progressive research-based assignment. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ENGL 2143 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

the Ancient Americas The past three decades have seen a revolution in the study of the Ancient Americas, one with far-reaching implications for how we understand indigenous society and culture on this continent. This course will take us on a journey of academic discovery—encompassing language, art, and materiality—that explains how the decipherment of a major writing system has revealed a previously hidden world. The Maya are one of the most distinctive and best-known of Mesoamerican peoples, who live today, as they did in ancient times, in the Yucatan Peninsula and a region that spans modern southern Mexico, the whole of Guatemala and Belize, and the westernmost fringes of Honduras and El Salvador. From as early as 1000 BCE they were erecting major architecture and flourished for twenty-five more centuries before the invasion of Europeans brought their independence to an end in the sixteenth century CE. Within their elaborate urban spaces, the Maya erected large stone monuments inscribed with imagery and hieroglyphic texts—most of them commissioned in the Classic Period that reaches from 150-900 CE —although the script is also found on many smaller and more intimate objects. For the first century of research these texts proved all but unintelligible, as faulty assumptions and lack of adequate sources left a deep pessimism that they could ever be understood. But beginning in the 1980s major progress in "cracking the code" took place and today we can read almost all inscriptions to some extent, a decent number in their entirety. This course will teach practical skills that allow students with no previous background to read Maya inscriptions and gain access to the history, politics, religious beliefs, and practical material culture they describe. The fabulous design of the hieroglyphs, that at first seem so impenetrable, will be broken-down to reveal not only language but an iconographic system that reveals much about the ancient Maya aesthetics and visual culture. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ANTH 2145, ARTH 2145 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Ancient Maya studies is one of the most dynamic and innovative fields in world archaeology today. Emerging as a true historical archaeology only in the past three decades, the decipherment of Maya script now provides a powerful complement and counterpoint to both traditional excavation data and new remote sensing technologies. Equally, the reading of images, and their interaction with texts and artifacts, forms a vital part of our interest in the broader humanistic concerns of worldview and the transcendent--where our primary interest lies in gaining access to past mentalities. This course will provide a comprehensive introduction into current knowledge of the Ancient Maya, with a recurring methodological focus on how different types of evidence are integrated to assemble a persuasive "portrait of the past." This scope of this process is unique in the ancient Americas, since only the Maya offer us the opportunity to read their own descriptions of the world two millennia or more in the past. Geographically, we will be looking at the greater Yucatan Peninsula, which today covers parts of southeastern Mexico, the whole of Guatemala and Belize, and the western extremities of Honduras and El Salvador. Since archaic times (before 1200 BCE) this has been occupied by speakers of the Mayan language group, and millions of people identified as Maya by that means continue to do so today (despite popular notions to the contrary, they have never "disappeared"). No prior knowledge of archaeology or art history is necessary. The course structure is one 3-hour session per week, consisting of a lecture followed by group discussion in seminar-style. Additionally, in Week 6 there will be a virtual tour of the new Mexico and Central American Gallery at Penn Museum. This will introduce the class to the issues of disseminating scholarship and building narratives that are accessible to the wider public. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ANTH 2150, ARTH 2200 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

The course circulates around ships and boats. The course combines methods from environmental humanities, visual arts and history to consider multi-modal practices of black freedom and escape. From free black sailors in the eighteenth century Caribbean Sea, to twentieth and twenty-first century West African fishing boats, notions of Haitian “boat people,” Parliament Funkadelic’s mothership, and sinking boats with Somali and Ethiopian migrants off Yemen’s coast, ships have been and remain technologies of containment and freedom for communities of African descent. In the face of environmental vulnerabilities and the reality of water ways as systems of sustenance and imminent death, this course asks: how do black people use the ship and the process and practice of shipping as vessels for freedom, escape, and as a site to experiment with futures? Using the city of Philadelphia and the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers as our primary site of interrogation, the course attends to the threats that black people experience following natural disaster (New Orleans, Haiti, Puerto Rico) and everyday engagement with the local and global state structures regarding water (Flint, MI). In this context, we also look to shipping as a site to theorize and account for black innovation, meanings of (non-)sovereignty, and alternative futures. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: AFRC 2238, ANTH 2338 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course explores an aspect of Latinx literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ENGL 2260 1 Course Unit University of Pennsylvania Catalog 2169

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This interdisciplinary seminar examines theory and artistic productions, including literature, films, and performance art, that analyze and critique capitalism, imperialism and (neo)colonialism, racism, and patriarchy. It examines history and culture from an international perspective, giving particular attention to works from the Global South (and from Latin America, especially) as well as works addressing the history of racialized groups within the Global North. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ENGL 2261 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

What is nature? What is culture? What kinds of practices and actors constitute what we call science? Who and what constitute the sphere we refer to as politics? A number of theoretical developments in cultural anthropology, political theory, critical geography, and feminist science studies have problematized the modernist ontological divide between Nature and Culture and a whole series of binary oppositions (such as objects/subjects, matter/form, bio/geo) that follow from it. Taking inspiration from this literature and placing it in conversation with Native and Indigenous scholarship and a series of contemporary socio- environmental struggles occurring in Latin America and beyond, this course will discuss the conceptual-methodological tools that a concern with politics of matter has generated. The epistemic and political implications of these tools go beyond their analytical usefulness as innovative devices to explore novel phenomena. They complicate well- established fields of inquiry, such as political ecology and economy, environmental studies, ethics, social justice, and modern politics; and, indeed, the singular ontology that these fields may inadvertently and explicitly sustain. We will explore how it is that things, stuff, matter, 'nature' came to fall outside modern politics as such, and the kinds of ethico-political repercussions that problematizing this division may produce.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This seminar focuses on the work of Clarice Lispector, the Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short story writer (1920-1977). See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. Also Offered As: COML 2390, ENGL 2390, GSWS 2390, PRTG 0090 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course will explore the history of indigenous peoples of Mexico from roughly 1400 to the present. Mesoamerica – the cultural region that encompassed what is today Mexico and much of Central America – in the fifteenth century saw the ascendance of the Aztec Empire in central Mexico (and beyond) and the continued independence of numerous Mayan communities. We will begin by looking at a diverse range of sources produced by the linguistically diverse people in these areas, particularly focusing on the “codices,” as the painted deer hide books that recorded history and ritual knowledge are known. Reading sources (in translation) by both European and indigenous languages (primarily Spanish, Nahuatl, and Maya), we will look at the divergent ways that Native communities and individuals responded to Spanish wars of conquest and how they responded to colonialism. The final part of the will look at the impact of Mexican independence and Revolution in the nineteenth century through the present, as well as the ongoing indigenous Mesoamerican diaspora to locales throughout the United States. In addition to written primary and secondary sources, we will consider a diverse array of visual sources – taking advantage of the spectacular holdings of the Penn museum – and contemporary cinema.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

the Colonial Caribbean This seminar considers the early history of the colonial Caribbean, not from the perspective of colonizing powers but rather from “below.” Beginning with European-indigenous contact in the fifteenth century, and ending with the massive slave revolt that became the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), we will focus on the different ways in which indigenous, African, European and creole men and women experienced European colonization in the Caribbean, as agents, victims and resistors of imperial projects. Each week or so, we will examine a different social group and its treatment by historians, as well as anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, and novelists. Along the way, we will pay special attention t the question of sources: how can we recover the perspectives of people who rarely left their own accounts? How can we use documents and material objects—many of which were produced by colonial officials and elites—to access the experiences of the indigenous, the enslaved, and the poor? We will have some help approaching these questions from the knowledgeable staff at the Penn Museum, the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and the Van Pelt Library.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

In August 1791, enslaved Africans on the northern plain of Saint Domingue (colonial Haiti) rose up in a coordinated attack against their French colonial masters, launching the initial revolt in what would come to be known as the Haitian Revolution. In the years that followed, their actions forced the abolition of racial discrimination and slavery throughout the French Empire. When Napoleon Bonaparte threatened to return slavery to Saint Domingue, they waged a war for independence, declaring Haiti the world's first "Black Republic" in 1804. This seminar will examine some of the major themes and debates surrounding Haiti's colonial and revolutionary history. We will begin by considering the colonial paradox: France's leading role in the intellectual movement called the "Enlightenment" coincided with its ascent as a slaveholding colonial power. The seminar will also explore parallels and points of connection between the revolutionary movements in France and Saint Domingue: how did increasingly radical ideas in France shape events in the Caribbean? Likewise, how did west African traditions and political ideologies influence insurgents and their leaders? And how, in turn, did revolution in the Caribbean impact the revolution in France? Finally, we will ask how the Haitian Revolution influenced ideas about liberty, sovereignty and freedom throughout the Atlantic World. We will read a combination of primary and secondary materials each week. A final research paper will be required of all students.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Exchange, 1450-1750 In this course we will explore how Native American technologies shaped the early modern Atlantic World in order to understand the role of culture in what is often called the "Columbian Exchange.” Technologies, for the purpose of this course, include animal practices (such as hunting and taming techniques), foraged and domesticated plants (such as maize, potatoes, and annatto), foods (such as cassava and chocolate), drugs o (such as tobacco, quinine and coca), textiles (such as hammocks and featherworks), and precious metals and gemstones (such as pearls, emeralds and gold). We will explore technologies' relationships to other aspects of art and culture, and focus particularly on how and why certain technologies - and not others - moved beyond colonial Latin America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We will read intensively in both primary and secondary sources.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course examines fascism and anti-fascist struggles through the study of film, literature, political theory, visual art, and history. While situating fascism in a global context, it focuses on its history in North and South America and Europe from the early 20th century into the 21st. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. Also Offered As: CIMS 2415, COML 2415, ENGL 2415 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This seminar compares practices that center on coca leaf production in indigenous communities, where coca cultivation has been sustained over millennia, on the one hand, with practices linked to the post 1961 “drug war” in the Americas, on the other. Participants will read scholarly work in history and anthropology, support one another through a research process, and explore what historians and other scholars might contribute to discussions about drug policy. Case studies we'll explore include Peruvian Quechua-speakers' ritual use of leaf, the history of Coca-Cola, patterns of violence in Medellín and Northern Mexico, and the evolution of money laundering in 1980-2010. Students will also have the opportunity to define a topic of interest to them and prepare an in-depth literature review.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This seminar will ponder Haiti's experience of debt and underdevelopment going back to the 19th century. Taking cues from the debate started by the New York Times in 2023, we will read and discuss texts describing debt, debt crisis, focusing on the interaction between global and local politics, the problem of debt forgiveness, etc. The approach will be chronological, with readings that will engage with the manner in which alternative capital markets set up reverberated locally and vice versa. We will also invite a number of Haitian and other scholars through interactive zoom sessions. While the seminar is focused in the case of Haiti we will also discuss broader implications. Also Offered As: ECON 0471, HIST 2451 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Credits (min)

1825

Credits (max)

2025

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

The course is an introduction to nutritional anthropology, an area of anthropology concerned with human nutrition and food systems in social, cultural and historical contexts. On the one hand, nutritional anthropologists study the significance of the food quest in terms of survival and health. On the other hand, they also know that people eat food for a variety of reasons that may have little, if anything, to do with nutrition, health, or survival. While the availability of food is dependent upon the physical environment, food production systems, and economic resources, food choice and the strategies human groups employ to gain access to and distribute food are deeply embedded in specific cultural patterns, social relationships, and political and economic systems. Thus, nutritional anthropology represents the interface between anthropology and the nutritional sciences, and as such, can provide powerful insights into the interactions of social and biological factors in the context of the nutritional health of individuals and populations. Because food and nutrition are quintessential biocultural issues, the course takes a biocultural approach drawing on perspectives from biological, socio- cultural and political-economic anthropology. Course content will include: a discussion of approaches to nutritional anthropology; basics of human nutrition; food systems, food behaviors and ideas; methods of dietary and nutritional assessment; and a series of case studies addressing causes and consequences to nutritional problems across the world. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ANTH 2590, URBS 2590 1 Course Unit University of Pennsylvania Catalog 2171

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Although Asians have lived in the Americas for centuries, the Asian American community and experience tends to be defined by the post-1965 wave of immigration to the United States. In an effort to correct this narrative this course will explore the histories, experiences, and contributions of some of the forgotten Asians of the Americas. In particular, we will focus on the earlier labor migrations of Chinese and South Asian individuals to the Caribbean and the United States. The experiences of these individuals, who built railroads, cut sugarcane, and replaced African slave labor, complicate our understandings of race today. By examining the legal and social debates surrounding their labor in the 19th century and exploring how their experiences are forgotten and their descendants are rendered invisible today, we will complicate what is Asian America and consider how this history shapes immigration policies today.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course presents a broad overview of the Latino population in the United States that focuses on the economic and sociological aspects of Latino immigration and assimilation. Topics to be covered include: construction of Latino identity, the history of U.S. Latino immigration, Latino family patterns and household structure, Latino educational attainment. Latino incorporation into the U.S. labor force, earnings and economic well-being among Latino-origin groups, assimilation and the second generation. The course will stress the importance of understanding Latinos within the overall system of race and ethnic relations in the U.S., as well as in comparison with previous immigration flows, particularly from Europe. We will pay particular attention to the economic impact of Latino immigration on both the U.S. receiving and Latin American sending communities, and the efficacy and future possibilities of U.S. immigration policy. Within all of these diverse topics, we will stress the heterogeneity of the Latino population according to national origin groups (i.e. Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and other Latinos), as well as generational differences between immigrants and the native born. This is an Academically Based Community Service (ABCS) course.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

A comprehensive review of theories and research on international migration. The course introduces the basic precepts of neoclassical economics, the new economics of labor migration, segmented labor market theory, world systems theory, social capital theory and the theory of cumulative causation. Readings examine patterns and processes of global migration during the classic age from 1800-1914 as well as during the postwar period from 1945 to the present. The course also covers a history and evaluation of immigration policies around the world, and devotes signification attention to theoretical and empirical perspectives on immigrant adaptation. Within this larger topic, we will also discuss internal migration and urbanization; the relationship between gender and migration; the spatial distribution of immigrants within the United States, immigrant communities, and ethnic enclaves; and the undocumented population in the United States. Also Offered As: SOCI 2660 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

The numerous traditions of Latin American art have been formed from the historical confluence of Indigenous, European, African, and Asian cultural traditions, each one impacting the others. This lecture course serves as an introduction to these hybrid New World art forms and movements by both providing a large chronological sweep (1492-present) and focusing on several specific countries, including Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Peru, and Argentina. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: AFRC 2670, ARTH 2670 Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6670 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

While this course will engage immigration issues more broadly, we will centrally focus on questions of immigrant incorporation and the effects of U.S immigration policy. We will start with the broad question of what should be done about the estimated 10.5 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Then, we will take a deeper look at the ways in which macro-level forces such as our laws and institutions shape the micro-level, everyday lives of undocumented immigrants and those living in mixed-status families. We will pay close attention to the circumstances of young people, including their experiences of exclusion and belonging across social and educational contexts. More specifically, we will examine how these factors might affect young people's development, schooling experiences, academic trajectories and aspirations, assimilation and ethnic identity, family dynamics, civic engagement, and employment. Also Offered As: SOCI 2680 Mutually Exclusive: SOCI 5680 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

What is inflation? What are its causes and consequences? Inflation has become a pressing concern recently, as prices of fuel, food, and consumer goods have ticked upwards at alarming rates. From the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, war in Ukraine, and climate disasters, current inflationary pressures are inseparable from the major events disrupting the global economy. This is as much the case today as it was following the discovery of silver mines in Potosí (Bolivia), the French Revolution, the breakdown of Bretton Woods, or the 1980s debt crises in Latin America. This course explores the economic and social consequences of inflation across history. It also considers the economic models used to explain the rise and fall of prices—and how economists and policy-makers experiment with new formulas when old ones appear obsolete. By exploring inflationary moments in historical perspective, this seminar explores topics like the political and social meanings of money, how to build trust in a new currency, and what governments can do (or tried to do) to correct financial crisis. Students will be asked to explore past moments of financial and economic crises on their own terms, but also to look for how the past can offer lessons for the present. Also Offered As: HIST 2710 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Few topics in ancient studies are experiencing such profound and revelatory change as that of the Ancient Maya—a complex society that covered what is today southeastern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and parts of Honduras and El Salvador. The decipherment of Maya script and advances in archaeological techniques, including aerial LiDAR scanning and isotopic analysis, are combining with art historical and literary sources to transform our understanding of a culture that ranks among the most famous, but enigmatic, on this continent. The ability to read Maya inscriptions has created the first historical archaeology for the ancient Americas, giving access to an Indigenous voice that has been silent for more than a millennium—with implications not only for scholarship but for the efforts of descendent peoples in asserting a modern Maya identity with existing Latin American states. This course will be a broad-based, contemporary look at archaeological practice as it operates through multiple disciplines, all in pursuit of the single goal of illuminating a vibrant and living past. Also Offered As: ANTH 2866 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

We need a placeholder for the possibility of an additional fall course. 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Model OAS Program (SNF Paideia Program

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course explores modern Luso-Brazilian culture and social movements through art forms such as literature, film, and music.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Emergent transdisciplinary fields, such as the environmental and medical humanities, reflect a growing awareness that responses to contemporary environmental dilemmas require the collaborative work of not only diverse scientists, medical practitioners, and engineers, but also more expansive publics, including artists, urban and rural communities, social scientists, and legal fields. This course is inspired e by the need to attend to environmental challenges, and their health, justice, and knowledge production implications, as inherently social concerns. The class is co-taught by faculty from the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Medicine, and will address the challenges and possibilities of working across disciplinary boundaries, building collaborative affinities, and negotiating frictions between diverse methodologies and epistemological approaches. Dr. Kristina Lyons from the Department of Anthropology brings years of experience collaborating with scientists, small farmers, indigenous communities, lawyers, and judges in Colombia and Chile on watershed restoration projects, soil degradation, toxicity, and the implementation of socio-ecological justice. Dr. Marilyn Howarth is a medical doctor from the Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology of the School of Medicine and has experience engaging the public, legislators and regulators around environmental health issues affecting the quality of air, water, soil and consumer products. Through their different lenses, they will foster interdisciplinary s environmental collaboration and scholarship by engaging students in discussions and research that bring together the arts and sciences regarding issues of urban air pollution, soil remediation, deforestation, and water contamination, among other environmental health problems. This class offers a unique opportunity for students from engineering, natural and social sciences, humanities, and the arts to learn to converse and collaborate around pressing socio-environmental and public health issues.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This intensive research seminar invites students to explore the history of farmworkers in the United States during the twentieth century. Research will primarily but not necessarily exclusively focus on the west coast, a region in which many archival sources have been digitized. Students may explore a wide variety of topics, including but not limited to: farmworker unions; the relationship between farmworker mobilizations and other movements in the US and abroad; the experiences of workers from the Philippines and Latin America and the role of US imperial and immigration policies in the lives of farmworkers; farmworkers' confrontations with and participation in systems of racism; the Great Depression in rural communities; the history of gender and family in farmworker communities; the history of environment and health; struggles over citizenship and social rights; counter-mobilizations of growers and the right; religion in farmworker communities; legislative and legal strategies to obtain rights denied agricultural workers in federal law; artistic, musical, and cultural production; or the relationship between consumers and the workers who produced their food. Also Offered As: HIST 3158 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

What does it mean to be Latinx in the United States? This introductory course examines how Latinx communities have developed critical consciousness about their histories, identities, and experiences from the sixteenth century to the present, with particular attention to the often-erased perspectives and knowledge production of Afro- Latinx peoples. Students will explore how communities, including Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Cubans, Mexican Americans, Central Americans, and others have theorized their experiences of colonialism, migration, racialization, and belonging in the US context. Grounded in a scholar-practitioner approach that bridges academic research with community-based cultural work, this course centers the ways Latinx communities have generated their own frameworks for understanding their realities. We will examine how Afro-Latinx communities have developed consciousness about anti-Black racism within Latinidad while articulating solidarities across difference and how this critical awareness has shaped both scholarly inquiry and grassroots organizing. The course investigates how consciousness emerges through cultural practices—from spiritual traditions that encode historical memory and resistance, to contemporary music, literature, and digital media that articulate new political possibilities. Key themes include the development of racial consciousness and the theorization of Blackness within latinidad, feminist and queer consciousness, language as a site of critical awareness, transnational political consciousness, and the role of cultural spaces in cultivating collective understanding. We will explore how Latinx communities have created knowledge about themselves through testimonios, cultural production, and community practice, and how this consciousness has fueled movements for labor rights, citizenship, reproductive justice, and educational access. Students will engage diverse materials, including historical documents, ethnographic research, testimonios, film, and creative expressions, to develop their own critical frameworks for analyzing the heterogeneity of Latinx experiences and the ongoing work of building liberatory consciousness.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

The peopling of the Americas is a question that has intrigued scholars and laymen for over 500 years. The origin of Native Americans was also a seminal issue during the emergence of American Anthropology as a discipline at the turn of the 20th century, with research on this topic animating current studies of ethnohistory, indigenous archeology, post-colonialism and repatriation. The proposed course will review the scholarship dedicated to describing this long history from an interdisciplinary perspective. It will explore their roots in the expansion of modern humans into Eurasia, evaluate the new archeological and genetic research that has fundamentally altered our understanding of the migration history and diversity of indigenous peoples in the American continents, and examine issues of identity, ethnicity and cultural heritage in contemporary Native populations that extend from this knowledge. The course will further draw on the instructor's fieldwork experience working with indigenous communities in Alaska, Canada, the Lower 48, Mexico and the Caribbean, as well as native Siberians in Russia, where the cultural and biological roots of ancestral Native American populations lie. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ANTH 3360 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

On the stage of modern world history, Haiti plays the unique role as both the exceptionally victorious and tragic character. This course interrogates archival documents, oral histories, historical texts, and prose created within the nation and her diaspora in order to establish a nuanced image of the projection of Haiti's modern history. Using two classic Haitian texts, Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Love, Anger, Madness (1968) and Michel- Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995),this course examines how, why,and to what end Haiti's history and popular narratives about the country have served to construct and dismantle global movements, popular culture, and meanings of race, gender, and citizenship in the Americas. In our historical examination, we will question some of the iconic representations of Haiti through literature that deepen the affective historical profile of Haiti with interrogations of culture, sexuality, political, and media performance. Students will become familiar with the post -colonial history of Haiti and the region, meanings of race, and the production of history. The course is a research and historical methods seminar. Students will conduct archival research and write narratives from primary source material. This course qualifies as a "methods" course for Africana Studies undergraduate majors and minors.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Writing Towards Transformation is a critical and creative writing workshop focused on developing works across genres that express and elaborate upon current and historical conditions of crisis and injustice. Using guided meditation, critical feedback and healthy, ethical discussion, the students of the class will develop manuscripts of poems, short stories, essays, plays and/or screenplays that in some way articulate their analysis of the present and the past towards a transformative future. We will read essays, manifestos, theater and fiction as well as view films that will hopefully inspire each student to develop texts and scripts of hope. Writers used as models of inspiration will include Gary Indiana, Valerie Solanas, June Jordan, Bertolt Brecht, Cherrie Moraga, Leslie Feinberg and Toni Cade Bambara, among many others. This is a graduate level course open to undergraduates by permission of the instructor. Also Offered As: ENGL 3514, GSWS 3514 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course provides an in-depth examination of theories of race and different kinds of social struggles for freedom around the globe. We will critically engage the latest scholarship from a variety of scholars and social movement actors. From anti-slavery revolts to struggles for independence to anti-apartheid movements, this course will emphasize how racialized peoples have employed notions of rights and societal resources grounded in cultural differences. Though much of the readings will highlight the experiences of African descendant peoples in Africa and its diaspora, the course will also explore the intersections of Black struggles with social movements organized by indigenous peoples in the Americas. Students will also have the unique experience of accessing readings primarily written by primarily Black scholars, some of whom have participated as key actors in the social movements they describe. Key concepts include power, resistance, subaltern, hegemony, identity politics, consciousness, and intellectual activism. The course will be organized around the following objectives: 1. To explore a range of contemporary theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches to the study of social movements; 2. To focus on the relationship between race, gender, class, culture, and politics in the African diaspora; 3. To study the historical development of organized struggles, social protests, uprisings, revolutions, insurgencies, and rebellions; 4. To examine the political agency of African descendant peoples in the global struggle for liberation and citizenship.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

On the stage of modern world history, Haiti plays the unique role as both the exceptionally victorious and tragic character. This course interrogates archival documents, oral histories, historical texts, and prose created within the nation and her diaspora in order to establish a nuanced image of the projection of Haiti's modern history. Using two classic Haitian texts, Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Love, Anger, Madness (1968) and Michel- Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995),this course examines how, why,and to what end Haiti's history and popular narratives about the country have served to construct and dismantle global movements, popular culture, and meanings of race, gender, and citizenship in the Americas. In our historical examination, we will question some of the iconic representations of Haiti through literature that deepen the affective historical profile of Haiti with interrogations of culture, sexuality, political, and media performance. Students will become familiar with the post -colonial history of Haiti and the region, meanings of race, and the production of history. The course is a research and historical methods seminar. Students will conduct archival research and write narratives from primary source material. This course qualifies as a "methods" course for Africana Studies undergraduate majors and minors.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course focuses on the musical genres and styles (both traditional and popular) that have grown up around the accordion in the New World. We will begin our explorations in Nova Scotia and move toward the Midwest, travelling through the polka belt. From there, our investigation turns toward Louisiana and Texas--toward zydeco, Cajun, and Tex-Mex music. We will then work our way through Central and South America, considering norteno, cumbia, vallenato, tango, chamame, and forro. Our journey will conclude in the Caribbean, where we will spend some time thinking about merengue and rake-n-scrape music. Throughout the semester, the musical case studies will be matched by readings and film that afford ample opportunity to think about the ways that music is bound up in ethnicity, identity, and class. We will also have occasion to think about the accordion as a multiply meaningful instrument that continues to be incorporated into debates over cultural politics and mobilized as part of strategies of representation through the New World. (Formerly Music 157). Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: AFRC 3550, MUSC 3550 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course considers Caribbean musics within a broad and historical framework.Caribbean musical practices are explored by illustrating the many ways that aesthetics, ritual, communication, religion, and social structure are embodied in and contested through performance. These initial inquiries open onto an investigation of a range of theoretical concepts that become particularly pertinent in Caribbean contexts-- concepts such as post-colonialism, migration, ethnicity, hybridity, syncretism, and globalization. Each of these concepts, moreover, will be explored with a view toward understanding its connections to the central analytical paradigm of the course--diaspora. Throughout the course, we will listen to many different styles and repertories of music ranging from calpso to junkanoo, from rumba to merengue, and from dance hall to zouk. We will then work to understand them not only in relation to the readings that frame our discussions but also in relation to our own North- American contexts of music consumption and production. (Formerly Music 258). Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: AFRC 3570, ANTH 2570, MUSC 3570 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course aims to familiarize students with the major achievements and cultural moments of Latin American cinematography. We will cover a broad set of themes, nations and time periods employing multiple theoretical positions.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Through the lens of border crossing this course will explore various current topics in Contemporary Latin American Cinema such as immigration, exile and travel narratives, gender crossing, social and political transgressions, transnationalism, and co-productions. The concept of the border will be fluid and central to the course, and through it we will reflect upon what separates and unites people at an individual, sexual, social, cultural, political, national, and geographical level. This focus will help us explore a wide variety of “movements”, negotiations, and transgressions taking place in the Latin American Cinema of the last three decades.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This creative and critical poetry writing workshop will focus on the study of poets associated with antiwar, feminist, leftist, queer/trans and racial justice liberatory movements. We will study the work of Pablo Neruda, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Sean Bonney, Ntozake Shange, Jake Skeets, Chrystos, Natalie Diaz, Adelaide Ivánova, Adrienne Rich and Sonia Sanchez in relationship to the communities and movements which their work engages. Students will also work on their own poetry and will formulate innovative ways to present their work to a wider audience in the forms of video poems, zines, broadsides, social media posts, podcasts and letter print posters. Also Offered As: AFRC 3660, ENGL 3660, FNAR 3660, GSWS 3660 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course is based on an understanding of theater as a social space and a cultural practice that allows a collectivity--in its most concrete sense, the audience--to think in public about itself and about the fundamental forces facing and shaping it. In this course, we will mainly read contemporary Latin American and Latinx theatrical texts produced by women and queer authors. Our focus will be to discuss how, in the last approximately four decades, the stage as space and performance as practice have been used in Latin America as vehicles to represent and discuss issues related to gender and sexuality, to reconfigure the parameters of these debates, to examine and question existing social structures and attitudes, to propose and rehearse alternative solutions to the problems faced by marginalized subjects, and overall to explore the transformative capabilities of theater. We will also examine how conceptions and representations of gender and sexuality intersect with other identitarian coordinates, such as race, class, and nationality. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: SPAN 3682 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Prerequisite

SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900

This course will focus on the theatrical tradition of Latin America during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In addition to reading some of the most influential playwrights of the region, we will discuss the aesthetic theories and sociohistorical contexts that have shaped contemporary Latin American and Latino theater and performance practices. We will also explore how the stage has served as a space in which to represent, debate, negotiate, and complicate issues related to national, gender, political, and ethnic communities and identities. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: SPAN 3684 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Prerequisite

SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900

This class develops a transnational and global approach to the rise of abolitionism in the nineteenth century. In a comparative framework, the class traces the rise of abolitionism in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, examining the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade, the rise of colonialism in Africa, and the growth of forced labor in the wake of transatlantic slave trade. We will deal with key debates in the literature of African, Atlantic and Global histories, including the causes and motivations of abolitionism, the relationship between the suppression of the slave trade and the growth of forced labor in Africa, the historical ties between abolitionism and the early stages of colonialism in Africa, the flow of indentured laborers from Asia to the Americas in the wake of the slave trade. This class is primarily geared towards the production of a research paper. *Depending on the research paper topic, History Majors and Minors can use this course to fulfill the US, Europe, Latin America or

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

The colonial period in Latin America spans more than 400 years. In this course, we study the culture of the Spanish-speaking Americas from the moment Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean to the Latin American wars of independence during the 19th century. We analyze the role that religion and race played in the emergence of colonial societies and the development of national revolutionary discourses. We reflect on the tensions between indigenous populations and Spanish settlers and study the literary culture that developed in the New World. Course content may vary. Please see the department website for current course offerings: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/hispanic-portuguese-studies/ undergraduate/hispanic-studies Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: SPAN 3700 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Prerequisite

SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900

Students in this seminar will choose their own research topic in the history of feminism. With guidance and support each person will produce a twenty-page paper based on intensive work with primary sources. Readings will range across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. We’ll take a long view, beginning in the sixteenth century, and use an expansive frame. Our purpose will not be to decide who was or wasn’t ‘a feminist’ but instead to try to understand actors within their contexts. Readings include scholarship on Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Sojourner Truth, the struggle for voting rights across national lines, opposition to dictatorship, and organizing against racism and homophobia. *For History Majors and Minors: Geographic requirement fulfilled by this seminar is dependent on research paper topic.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

From wax cylinders to reel-to-reel to digital video, recording technologies expanded the historical profession dramatically during the twentieth century. We will read some classics, such as Barbara Myerhoff’s Number Our Days and Alessandro Portelli’s Death of Luigi Trastulli, as well as scholarly pieces aimed at working historians and very new work, such as Dylan Penningroth’s Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights. We will also explore the interface between documentary filmmaking, pod-casts, and more traditional Oral History forms. However, this course centers on methodology—students will learn about ‘best practices’ in the field and will work toward creating an interview record that can be housed in an archive and accessed by other researchers even as interviewees and their families retain intellectual property rights.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This research seminar considers the overlapping political worlds of performers like Violeta Parra (b. Chile 1917), Pete Seeger (b. USA 1919), Miriam Makeba (b. South Africa 1932), Vladimir Vysotsky (b. USSR 1938), Gilberto Gil (b. Brazil 1942), Bob Marley (b. Jamaica 1945), Silvio Rodríguez (b. Cuba 1946), Waldemar Bastos (b. Angola 1954), and others. We will have shared readings about youth-identified musicians who brought Leftist politics on stage with them, as well as about the activism of anti-communists and anti-Stalinists in different geographic spaces. Each participant will produce a 15-20 page paper based on primary sources. Throughout the semester, in-class work will be designed to support the research process. Students will work through multiple drafts and share their writing with one another. Faculty members from Music, Comparative Literature, and other departments will be invited as guest speakers, as will folklorists, performers, and members of other Philadelphia-area communities. Also Offered As: HIST 3713 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Something unprecedented has been happening lately in the Latin American literary market and scene. Women writers in great numbers have been publishing without encountering major constraints or pressures, and their fictional work has been receiving more awards and critical accolades than ever before. Hence, the assertion made by a critic in El País that “the other Latin American Boom is female” (“El otro ‘boom’ latinoamericano es femenino”) merits to be considered and unpacked. For example, compared to their literary precursors, have the 21st-century female authors presented the customary topics of family, motherhood, sexuality, illness, etc. in a radical new way? Which are the social, political, economic, and aesthetic conditions that have given raise to this proliferation of female authors and the wide acceptance of their fictional worlds? How do these conditions differ from the Latin American literary Boom of the 20th century? These are among the questions we will explore. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: SPAN 3732 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Prerequisite

SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900

Why has Latin American narrative of the 1960s and 70s enjoyed such popular and critical success? What distinguishes this literature from that which was written earlier or later or outside Latin America? Who were the major writers of the boom generation, and what unites or separates them? In this course we will consider these questions as we read important works of fiction by authors such as Cortázar, Donoso, Fuentes, GarcÃa Márquez, and Vargas Llosa as well as criticism that sheds light on the phenomenon of the boom. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: SPAN 3734 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Prerequisite

SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course examines contemporary narratives of childhood and adolescence from Latin America. These stories critique the forces that shape young people as they attempt to define themselves in societies marked by racial, ethnic, gender, and class divisions. Texts for the course will be drawn from different geographical regions and will include novels, short stories, and films from the second half of the twentieth century through the present. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: SPAN 3738 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Prerequisite

SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900

Non-fiction is a narrative mode that presents an account of a subject as fact, but it is a label that began to be used to describe narratives dealing with real events and real people fairly recently. This course studies the boundaries and tensions between facts and fiction in Latin America from a historical perspective. We start by analyzing early modern writing by the Spanish conquistadors: cannibals, human sacrifices, sirens, sea monsters, and El Dorado are just a few subjects that 16th- century “non-fiction” presents as facts. We move then to discuss 19th- century journalism about cosmopolitanism and urban modernization. Technological innovations blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, something that film, narrative journalism, and literary chronicles would exploit thought-out the 20th century. Finally, we study non-fictional narratives in contemporary podcasts and social media. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: SPAN 3740 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Prerequisite

SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900

Born as a sub-genre, crime fiction (a denomination which encompasses a wide number of texts: classical detective stories, hard-boiled, true-crimes and the non investigative crime novel) has become one of the most attractive literary forms for writers, and one of the favorites for readers. Because it is built around topics like the crime and the law, the search of the truth and the unstable identity of the subject in mass societies, it has become an ideal vehicle for the expression of the anxieties and fears that dominate the contemporary culture. Its versatility has been used by many Latin-American authors to express the social and political conflicts of the continent, as well as to explore its literary possibilities through formal searches, characterized by parody, meta-literary and auto referential games. The aims of this course are, on the one hand, to offer a panoramic vision of the crime fiction in Latin America through the reading of some representative authors; and, on the other, to explore how they can be can be read from different theoretical approaches. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: SPAN 3742 1 Course Unit University of Pennsylvania Catalog 2179

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Prerequisite

SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900

Cuidado (Care) across the Americas This course thinks with and from Latin America to consider the environmental and ecological conflicts and politics of cuidado (care) emerging across the hemisphere in times of climate crisis and deepening socio-environmental injustice. Latin American thinkers and practitioners have provided innovative conceptual and methodological tools for analyzing, organizing, and acting in defense of territory and life. In this course, we will consider how legacies of colonialism and (neo)extractivism are not only an ongoing curse of the Americas, but also a a condition of possibility for feminist, decolonial, Indigenous, and ecological proposals, such as degrowth, buen vivir, cuerpo-territorio (body-territory), rights of nature, ontological politics, and participatory action research, among other ways of knowing, being, and doing. What can we learn from engagement with the historic and contemporary socioenvironmental challenges occurring across the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking Americas? How are diverse urban and rural communities, technoscientific actors, researchers, and ancestral knowers understanding and responding to the region’s emerging climate and environmental scenarios? What are the possibilities for dialogue, exchange, and problem solving between such diverse actors and their multiple ways of knowing and being that span millennial, colonial, and modernizing temporalities? Throughout the course, we will interrogate and reflect on these questions from the situated perspectives of Latin America and its many territorial realities, ecological relations, and social worlds. Also Offered As: ANTH 3750 Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 5750, LALS 5745, LALS 5750 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course focuses on literary representations of rural Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries. While it remains common to understand rural societies as traditional or backward in contrast with the city (considered the true center of modernity), this course approaches rural social orders as sites of modernity and modernization in their own right. We will be primarily concerned with examining how works Latin American literature and film created rural visions of modernity, particularly in relation to land reform, political revolution, and capitalist agriculture. While our principal focus will be literature, we will also consider how other forms such painting, film, and political documents envisioned rural transitions. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: SPAN 3802 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Prerequisite

SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900

Studies the central role played by cultural production in forging and imagining national revolutionary projects, from the 1910s to the 1970s. Focusing on literature, photography, painting, and film, we will examine the works of figures such as Diego Rivera, José Vasconcellos, Tina Modotti, Sergei Eisenstein, Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, Rosario Castellanos, Nellie Campobello, José Emilio Pacheco, and Carlos Monsiváis, among others. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: SPAN 3804 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Prerequisite

SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900

This course explores the phenomenon of Latin American dictatorship through literature, film, graphic novels, and visual and public art, asking how these different media and genres depict and respond to state violence, censorship, and trauma. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: CIMS 3806, SPAN 3806 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Prerequisite

SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900

Cities exist not just in their geography, but in their spirit, and that spiri is captured in literature. In this course we will read compelling works from Mexico City, Lima, and Buenos Aires that represent life in these Latin American capitals at different points between 1950 and the present. As we explore fiction and non-fiction writing by both established authors and emerging writers, we will learn about the forces and events that have shaped narratives of the urban experience in Latin America. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: SPAN 3808 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Prerequisite

SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900

The Amazon evokes opposing images. It has been described alternately as paradise lost and green hell, a place to retreat from the restraints of civilization or to be devoured by savage men and beasts, a land of natural abundance and environmental degradation. Our objective in this course is not to determine which of these descriptions is most accurate, but to understand how these opposing visions were created and what they aim to communicate. As we explore the Amazon through works of fiction we will gain an appreciation of the problems and promise of the region as well as greater knowledge of important authors, themes, and techniques of Latin American literature. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: SPAN 3810 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Prerequisite

SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900

A transnational and interdisciplinary examination of the black experience in Latin America and the Spanish, French and English-speaking Caribbean, since slavery to the present. Combining cultural analysis with the study of fundamental theoretical works on race and racialization, students will gain a thorough comprehension of historical, political and sociocultural processes shaping the existence of Afro-descendants in the Americas. The scrutiny of systemic racial exclusion and marginalization will allow the understanding of how these dividing practices condition cultural production.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

A thorough panorama of contemporary Caribbean societies and their diasporic communities, this course enhances the students' knowledge of the region's main historical, political, and sociocultural trends. We will examine Caribbean multiple narratives of survival and resilience within a global context, through the study of 20th and 21st-centuries literary, cinematographic, musical, visual and performative works. The cultural analysis will be supported by a theoretical framework encompassing critical Caribbean theories on identity and identification. t

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course studies Mexico through many lenses. From history to art, from anthropology to pop culture, from literature to film, our primary objective is to question current and past iconicity to develop a more complex and nuanced understanding of Mexican history and culture. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: SPAN 3902 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Prerequisite

SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900

This course examines Marxist thought in Latin America, from the early twentieth century to the present. We will study a range of materials from across Spanish America, including essays, novels, films and speeches. We will ask after the specificities of Latin American Marxist thought (on the land and indigenous questions, dependency, guerrilla warfare, etc), at the same time as we contextualize those specificities within a wider Marxist tradition. We will also inquire into the waning and resurgence of Marxism in recent decades in the region. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: SPAN 3904 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Prerequisite

SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900

This course asks students to read ethnographic accounts as literature and to read literature in light of interdisciplinary concerns surrounding representation and cultural difference. The course is transhistorical and transatlantic but with a strong focus on Latin America. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: SPAN 3906 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Prerequisite

SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This interdisciplinary course exposes students to the three dimensions of sustainable development -environmental, economic, and social- through an examination of three products -peyote, coca, and coffee- that are crucial in shaping modern identity in areas of Latin America. The course integrates this analysis of sustainable development in relation to cultural sustainability and cultural practices associated with peyote, coca, and coffee and their rich, traditional heritage and place in literature, film, and the arts. This is an upper level seminar open to majors and minors of Spanish and those who have completed Pre-requiste SPAN 1800 or SPAN 1900 or permission of the Undergraduate Chair. Fall, even numbered years only Also Offered As: ENVS 3053, SPAN 3910 Mutually Exclusive: SPAN 0091 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Prerequisite

SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900

This course illuminates how debates over immigration have transformed the legal contours of the United States. We examine the evolution of federal immigration policy and the legal battles immigrants waged against exclusionary practices in the U.S. from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1980s. The key federal and state cases explored in this course center on national citizenship, housing segregation, and school segregation. In addition to considering the key legal issues at stake in these cases, this course also encourages an analysis of the roles race, disability, gender, and labor play in shaping U.S. law within the context of immigration history. Also Offered As: ASAM 3110, HIST 3910 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course studies different forms of cultural production (film, novel, short story, critical essay) as entry-points into new settings and conditions for work in Latin America, in four sectors that have become especially salient in the region: services, finance, agro-industry and the informal economy (particularly drug trafficking). We will pay particular attention to how cultural production allows us to envision the coordinates of the larger, indeed global, economy into which workers are inserted. We will examine how cultural production allows us to map shifting class structures; we will also track how gender and race shape national and international divisions of labor. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: CIMS 3912, SPAN 3912 1 Course Unit University of Pennsylvania Catalog 2181

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Prerequisite

SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900

The first goal of this course is to examine different “cases” of mental disturbances suffered by women in Hispanic cultures as they have been depicted in novels, short stories and films in the last 50 years. We will study "cases" of female madness precipitated by maternity, domesticity, sexuality, creativity, historical events, and biculturalism. Secondly, we will focus on the “causes” psychoanalysts, authors and literary critics have proposed for those mental illnesses. Additional readings on a wide range of disciplines --feminism, literary theory, psychology and psychoanalysis-- will enhance our understanding of the works selected for the course and will help us identify their political and ideological underpinnings. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: SPAN 3914 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Prerequisite

SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900

This course provides an insightful understanding of the main aesthetic, socioeconomic, political and cultural dynamics at play in the 20th and 21st centuries Latin American societies and Latinx communities in the United States. Combining the analysis of literary, cinematic, musical, visual and performative works with theoretical readings, students will discuss issues on national, racial, gender and sexual identifications; pervasive inequalities, the impact of globalization and new technologies; migration, violence, terror, revolutions, dictatorships, the Cold War, and the implementation and effects of Neoliberalism. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: SPAN 3916 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Prerequisite

SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900

This course explores the involvement of the Latinx environmental justice movement since the 1960s. It addresses theories and concepts of environmental racism and environmental justice, underscoring how Latinx have challenged, expanded, and contributed to the environmental justice discourse. In this course, students will explore national case studies of environmental and racial injustice as they bear on Latinx communities both in rural areas and in urban barrios throughout the United States. The course will analyze these case studies through the lens of Latinx artistic and literary texts (essays, paintings, short stories documentaries, and short films) as they provide a unique historic and multicultural perspective of the Latinx experience with environmental injustice and of how Latinxs imagine alternative transitions and responses to environmental marginalization. In addition, the works of Latinx artists and writers will serve as case studies to deconstruct racial stereotypes of Latinxs as unconcerned about environmental issues, shedding light on how they share a broad engagement with environmental ideas. The case studies analyzed in this course emphasize race and class differences between farmworkers and urban barrio residents and how they affect their respective struggles. The unit on farmworkers will focus on workplace health issues such as toxic chemicals and collective bargaining contracts. The unit on urban barrios will focus on gentrification, affordable housing, and toxic substances in the home. We will also review current and past programs that have been organized to address the aforementioned problems. This is an Academically Based Community Service Course (ABCS course) through which students will learn from and provide support to a Latinx-serving organization in the City of Philadelphia on preventing exposure to hazardous substances, thus bridging the information gap on environmental justice issues in the Latinx community in Philadelphia. Information dissemination and education efforts will be conducted by collaborating with Esperanza Academy Charter School in Philadelphia to implement lessons on preventing exposure to hazardous substances. Studying environmental justice and pairing it with community service will heighten students' awareness of the complexities of culture, race, gender, and class while providing them with an invaluable experience of cross- cultural understanding.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This co-taught course examines films with thematic and epochal focus on some of the major political and historical events of the 20th century that have resulted in revolutions. In this course, Brink and Revolution will be given equal emphasis, as many film makers document, or render plausible through fiction, failures as well as successes, new vistas as well as blind spots, in attempts at revolution. We seek to explore the arc of revolutions, their beginnings, conflicts, and propulsion as people in movement attempt to create new social, cultural and economic orders, , and the efforts of film makers to chronicle their actions, manifestos, popular mobilization, conflicts and constraints. Marx’s dictum “Men make history, but not as they choose” is evident in many films that capture cinematically the dialectical tensions between institutions and people seeking to maintain an existing order, often with high doses of repression, and those social movements and actors with oppositional imaginaries of the political present and future. Yet we are expanding Marx’s dictum to encompasses people of all genders who make, act in, produce and serve as models for cinemas on the brink of revolution.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

alternative) Total Course Units 32 You may count no more than one course toward both a Major and a Sector requirement. For Exceptions, check the Policy Statement (http:// www.college.upenn.edu/sectors-policy/). The degree and major requirements displayed are intended as a guide for students entering in the Fall of 2026 and later. Students should consult with their academic program regarding final certifications and requirements for graduation. 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26

Subject

LALS

Credits (min)

1

Credits (max)

1

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

The purpose of this course to create a Latino Studies/Service Learning ABCS course that cultivates dialogue and knowledge about the social, political, cultural and historical complexities of the Latinx experience in the United States (Philadelphia in particular) and the roles Latinx CBO's play in meeting the needs of Latinx communities and in impacting social change.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course takes a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of the resiliency and impact of Latinx cultural and artistic contributions, aesthetics, expressions, and institution building in the United States from the Civil Rights Era to the present. We will explore how Latinxs culturally define being "American", and how their artistic expressions shape and influence the creativity and productivity of American and global arts & cultural expressions. More broadly, we will explore the Latinx interactions of race, culture, society, economy, and politics in the U.S. Also Offered As: SOCI 2932 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Topics vary: Black Feminist Approaches to History & Memory - The term black feminism emerged in public discourse amid the social, political, and cultural turbulence of the 1960s. The roots of black feminism, however, are much older, easily reaching back to the work of black women abolitionists and social critics of the nineteenth century. The concept continued to grow and evolve in the work of twentieth century black women writers, journalists, activists, and educators as they sought to document black women's lives. Collectively, their work established black feminism as a political practice dedicated to the equality of all people. More recently, black feminism has been deployed as a tool for theoretical and scholarly analysis that is characterized by an understanding that race, class, gender, and sexuality are inextricably interconnected. Using materials such as slave narratives, social criticism, and archival sources, this course will explore the theoretical and practical applications of black feminist thought in nineteenth and twentieth century North American culture and politics. In particular, we will consider the symbols and practices (storytelling, myth-making, art, archival research) that black women use to document lives. We will ask: how do these methods of documentation inform our understanding of the past and the production of historical knowledge? How can we understand black feminism as both theory and practice? And what are the implications of black feminist approaches for current research and scholarship? We will give particular attention to concepts such as gender, race, memory, the archive, and embodied knowledge to complicate our understanding of historical documentation, epistemology, and authenticity. The course material will include scholarship by Harriet Jacobs, Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, Hazel Carby, Hershini Young, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Toni Morrison, and others. (Image: From In Praise of Shadows, Kara Walker (2009). See the Africana Studies Department's website at https:// africana.sas.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This undergraduate seminar is for advanced undergraduates seeking to make sense of the upsurge in racist activism, combined with authoritarian populism and neo-fascist mobilization in many parts of the world. Contemporary manifestations of the phenomena noted above will be examined in a comparative and historical perspective to identify patterns and anomalies across various multiple nation-states. France, The United States, Britain, and Italy will be the countries examined. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: AFRC 4650, PSCI 4190 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course invites graduate students and advanced undergraduates with prior authorization to explore scholarship and primary materials on the transnational dimensions of black social movements. Recent phenomena such as the world- wide protest against the extrajudicial killing of George Floyd and the political assassination of Rio de Janeiro city council member Marielle Franco are two examples of the ways in which events involving black death in one locale resonate in multiple sites across the globe. Uprisings and demonstrations seemingly divided by language, culture and nation-state find common cause in collective action in response to patterns and instances of injustice and inequality. Course materials provide documentary evidence and analysis of the transnational circuitry of black social movement networks that have arisen in response to racisms targeting black and brown population. Members of scheduled castes in India, aboriginal populations in Australia and New Zealand, and Afro-descendent populations in the Americas and Europe, have become agents of change and forged substantive alliances and strategic coalitions with other social movement tendencies. Scholarship from social movement theory, Black Studies, comparative history and political theory help constitute the core reading for this course. Film, documentary narrative and autobiography will supplement reading assignments.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

In this course, we will examine historical, scholarly and community narratives about race and racialized communities in Latin America. Course texts and discussions will center Black and Indigenous histories and contemporary identities across the region. Our journey this semester will span from the pre-Columbian era to the present day, and will cover multiple Latin American geographies: the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. While we will focus most closely on the Spanish- speaking populations, we will also incorporate texts and discussion about populations speaking other languages in the region (Portuguese, French, Quechua, Kreyól, and English, for example). Finally, the diasporas of Latin America, particularly in the United States, will also figure in the discussions as sites of Latin American convergence, community and interaction in which race functions in various ways. As such, we will engage with a wide range of texts including books, articles (scholarly and popular), video, primary sources, and interviews. Also Offered As: AFRC 5030 1 Course Unit University of Pennsylvania Catalog 2185

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

In Latin America, 80% of the population lives in a city. As many of these cities enter the worldwide competition for attracting networks and capitals—and to join the select club of the so-called global cities—many city residents become progressively dispossessed and excluded to the peripheries, where urban services are rarely adequate. Power relations of class, race, and gender play an essential role in how dispossession is orchestrated in the city and experienced by its residents. This course focuses on how women, specifically, find ways to “endure” in the cities of Latin America, exploring different cases of urban struggles led by women. Across the region, many have been pointing out the extraordinary leadership of women in a wide variety of political struggles - from occupying public places, to denouncing the disappearance of loved ones, and to community organizing that helps build necessary infrastructure in their neighborhoods. Women are also at the forefront of environmental and ecological transformations, leading initiatives to green their city through urban agriculture, reforestation, recycling, and compost projects. Addressed through a holistic approach to caring, these initiatives are embedded in broader struggles for housing, security, and wellness, specifically in the urban peripheries. The contingency of these projects is, at their core, multifaceted: they are typically part of women’s implication in popular education, artivism, and human rights defense. During this course, we will explore and analyze how the specific urban contexts of Latin America affect women and their political subjectivities and how, through their struggles, they play an essential role in re-shaping their cities. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: GSWS 5050, URBS 5050 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This seminar will explore some of the most important issues that are now a central part of archaeological, anthropological and historical research throughout the world. The identification and control of cultural heritage is a central part of the framework for research within other communities. Issues for this course will also include cultural identity, human rights, repatriation, colonialism, working with communities and many other topics. Field research today must be based upon a new series of ethical standards that will be discussed and examined within this class. Major topics include: cultural heritage - definitions and constructs, cosmopolitanism and collecting, archaeology and looting, cultural heritage preservation, museums - universal and national, museum acquisition policies, cultural identity, international conventions (including underwater issues), national laws of ownership, community based development, cultural tourism, development models, and human rights. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ANTH 5110 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This graduate level course will be embedded in course PSCI/LALS 213. In other words, graduate students taking this course will have to attend lectures twice a week, but instead of discussing materials in recitations will meet with the professor either weekly (one hour) or biweekly (two hours), to discuss the main topics of the course and research questions and proposals related to the course.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Writing Towards Transformation is a critical and creative writing workshop focused on developing works across genres that express and elaborate upon current and historical conditions of crisis and injustice. Using guided meditation, critical feedback and healthy, ethical discussion, the students of the class will develop manuscripts of poems, short stories, essays, plays and/or screenplays that in some way articulate their analysis of the present and the past towards a transformative future. We will read essays, manifestos, theater and fiction as well as view films that will hopefully inspire each student to develop texts and scripts of hope. Writers used as models of inspiration will include Gary Indiana, Valerie Solanas, June Jordan, Bertolt Brecht, Cherrie Moraga, Leslie Feinberg and Toni Cade Bambara, among many others. This is a graduate level course open to undergraduates by permission of the instructor. Also Offered As: GSWS 5140 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Based in concepts and principles of Constitutional law and critical race theory, this course explores the interpretation and impact of seminal court cases in U.S. history as applied to Latinxs in the United States and abroad. With a particular focus on the 20th century, students will examine how court decisions have affected civil rights, immigration policies, welfare, political incorporation, education, and other important issues affecting Latinxs. Students will also explore additional themes including the status and treatment of Latinxs in the criminal justice system, representation of Latinxs in the judiciary and how Supreme Court decisions have affected U.S. foreign policy with Latin America.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Market Women, Madames, Mistresses & Mother Superior studies gender, labor, sexuality, and race in the Caribbean. In our historical examination of primary source documents alongside literature, and popular media, we will question some of the iconic representations of Caribbean and Latin American women in order to understand the meaning, purpose and usages of these women s bodies as objects of praise, possession, obsession and/or ridicule by communities, governments and religions within and outside of the region. Beginning in the late-18th century and ending with contemporary migration narratives, this course considers the relationship between slave society and colonial pasts on gender performance in the modern Caribbean, Latin America, and their diasporas.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

and The United States Infectious agents continue to emerge, killing and harming humans and animals with unrelenting regularity. The emergence and control of these agents are, in some ways, remarkably different in different geographies. In other ways the patterns and consequences of infectious agents are very similar. The course will be structured around a series of pairings of infectious disease problems that affect Peru and the United States. Some pairings will be in terms of the agents themselves; others will be more thematic. In each case we will trace two lines of inquiry, one in each country, but always with an eye to the harmonics--where these lines resonate--even if they do not interact. The primary goal of the course is to investigate the historical, political and economic forces driving infectious disease in Peru and the US. A co-primary goal is to bring students and faculty from Penn and our partner institutions in Peru, Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, to work their way through topics in infectious disease control, which are inherently challenging. The course will be taught in English but a workable knowledge of Spanish will be helpful.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Traditionally, archaeological research has focused on the "site" or "sites." Regional investigation tends to stress settlement pattern and settlement system determined through archaeological site survey. This seminar will stress the space between the sites or "points" on the landscape. Most previous attempts at "landscape archaeology" tended to focus on the relationship of sites and the natural environment. This course will highlight the cultural, "anthropogenic," or "built environment"--in this case human modification and transformation of the natural landscape in the form of pathways, roads, causeways, monuments, walls, agricultural fields and their boundaries, gardens, astronomical and calendrical alignments, and water distribution networks. Features will be examined in terms of the "social logic" or formal patterning of cultural space. These can provide insights into indigenous structures such as measurement systems, land tenure, social organization, engineering, cosmology, calendars, astronomy, cognition, and ritual practices. Landscapes are also the medium for understanding everyday life, experience, movement, memory, identity, time, and historical ecology. Ethnographic, ethnohistorical, and archaeological case studies will be investigated from both the Old and New Worlds. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: AAMW 5570, ANTH 5570 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course is designed to introduce students to current literature on race/ethnic difference in health and mortality in the United States, covering such topics as explanations for why some race/ethnic groups fare better than others, how inner city poverty and residential segregation may contribute to racial/ethnic differences in health outcomes, and health of immigrants versus native-born populations. Current policy debated and recent policy developments related to health are also briefly discussed. The course is organized as a seminar with a combination of lectures and class discussions. Also Offered As: SOCI 5640 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

While this course will engage immigration issues more broadly, we will centrally focus on questions of immigrant incorporation and the effects of U.S immigration policy. We will start with the broad question of what should be done about the estimated 10.5 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Then, we will take a deeper look at the ways in which macro-level forces such as our laws and institutions shape the micro-level, everyday lives of undocumented immigrants and those living in mixed-status families. We will pay close attention to the circumstances of young people, including their experiences of exclusion and belonging across social and educational contexts. More specifically, we will examine how these factors might affect young people's development, schooling experiences, academic trajectories and aspirations, assimilation and ethnic identity, family dynamics, civic engagement, and employment.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Cuidado (Care) across the Americas This course thinks with and from Latin America to consider the environmental and ecological conflicts and politics of cuidado (care) emerging across the hemisphere in times of climate crisis and deepening socio-environmental injustice. Latin American thinkers and practitioners have provided innovative conceptual and methodological tools for analyzing, organizing, and acting in defense of territory and life. In this course, we will consider how legacies of colonialism and (neo)extractivism are not only an ongoing curse of the Americas, but also a a condition of possibility for feminist, decolonial, Indigenous, and ecological proposals, such as degrowth, buen vivir, cuerpo-territorio (body-territory), rights of nature, ontological politics, and participatory action research, among other ways of knowing, being, and doing. What can we learn from engagement with the historic and contemporary socioenvironmental challenges occurring across the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking Americas? How are diverse urban and rural communities, technoscientific actors, researchers, and ancestral knowers understanding and responding to the region’s emerging climate and environmental scenarios? What are the possibilities for dialogue, exchange, and problem solving between such diverse actors and their multiple ways of knowing and being that span millennial, colonial, and modernizing temporalities? Throughout the course, we will interrogate and reflect on these questions from the situated perspectives of Latin America and its many territorial realities, ecological relations, and social worlds. Also Offered As: ANTH 5750 Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3750 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Beginning with the ancient Greeks, people have created specific biographical structures as a way to understand and explain the artistic process. Artists have often been labeled as natural prodigies possessing creative powers on par with the divine. This seminar will examine the role that biography plays in the assessment of visual art and the creative process over time and across European and American culture. During the semester we will read art historical texts, watch biographical films, and debate the historical and post-structuralist critical theory that has helped to shape the current cultural construction of the artist. Throughout the seminar we will discuss the underlying debates around these various approaches to biography. This course is open to graduate students and undergraduate students with permission of the instructor. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: AFRC 5792, ARTH 5792, CIMS 5792, GSWS 5792 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

With a distinct emphasis on performance, film, installation art, video and painting, this course explores the explosion of body-based, nude and erotic work from the 1950 to the 1970s, with particular focus on the 1960s. And it seeks to explore this dynamic not only within the familiar confines of North America and Europe but within Latin America and Asia, too, in what was a nearly simultaneous international emergence of the erotic as a political force in the art world. Reading a range of key voices from Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse, to performance artists Carolee Schneemann and Yoko Ono, Neo-Freudian theorist Norman O. Brown and Brazilian theorist and poet Oswald de Andrade, we will examine how and why sexuality became a privileged form of politics at this historical juncture in a range of different context across the globe. We will pay particular attention to how and why an art about sex became a camouflaged form of political dissidence in the confines of repressive political dictatorships, as were then rising in Brazil Argentina. and ultimately Chile. Students interested in feminist, gender or queer theory, Latin American Studies, social revolution, performance studies, post war art and Frankfurt School thought should find the course particularly appealing, but it assumes no background in any of these fields.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This graduate seminar focuses on issues of political regime change and democratization, as studied in the comparative politics literature. The course is structured in three parts. In the first part, we scrutinize conceptualizations and measurements of democracy that are used in comparative politics. In the second part, we study political economy and comparative historical theories about the causes of democratization. We assess the relative strength of theories that focus on economic development, inequality (whether of income, land, or labor), social class actors, insurgency, institutions, and/or strategic choices and interactions. In the final part of the course, political regimes in action, we study different aspects of democratization as they relate to current and salient issues of comparative politics. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: PSCI 6106 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course is designed to familiarize graduate students with some of the key texts and debates in Africana Studies concerning the relationship between racial slavery, modernity and politics. Beginning with the Haitian Revolution, much of black political thought (thinking and doing politics) has advocated group solidarity and cohesion in the face of often overwhelming conditions of servitude, enslavement and coercion within the political economy of slavery and the moral economy of white supremacy. Ideas and practices of freedom however, articulated by political actors and intellectuals alike, have been as varied as the routes to freedom itself. Thus, ideas and practices of liberty, citizenship and political community within many African and Afro-descendant s communities have revealed multiple, often competing forms of political imagination. The multiple and varied forms of political imagination, represented in the writings of thinkers like Eric Williams, Richard Wright, , Carole Boyce Davies and others, complicates any understanding of black political thought as having a single origin, genealogy or objective. Students will engage these and other authors in an effort to track black political thought's consonance and dissonance with Western feminisms, Marxism, nationalism and related phenomena and ideologies of the 20th and now 21st century. Also Offered As: AFRC 6550, GSWS 6550 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Exploration of issues affecting educational policy and classroom practice in multilingual, multicultural settings, with an emphasis on ethnographic research. Selected U.S. and international cases illustrate concerns relating to learners' bilingual/bicultural/biliterate development in formal educational settings. Topics include policy contexts, program structures, teaching and learning in the multilingual classroom, discourses and identities in multilingual education policy and practice, and the role of teachers, researchers, and communities in implementing change in schools.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

The numerous traditions of Latin American art have been formed from the historical confluence of Indigenous, European, African, and Asian cultural traditions, each one impacting the others. This lecture course serves as an introduction to these hybrid New World art forms and movements by both providing a large chronological sweep (1492-present) and focusing on several specific countries, including Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Peru, and Argentina. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ARTH 6670 Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 2670 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

A comprehensive review of theories and research on international migration. The course introduces the basic precepts of neoclassical economics, the new economics of labor migration, segmented labor market theory, world systems theory, social capital theory and the theory of cumulative causation. Readings examine patterns and processes of global migration during the classic age from 1800ï¿?1914 as well as during the postwar period from 1945 to the present. The course also covers a history and evaluation of immigration policies around the world, and devotes signification attention to theoretical and empirical perspectives on immigrant adaptation. Within this larger topic, we will also discuss internal migration and urbanization; the relationship between gender and migration; the spatial distribution of immigrants within the United States, immigrant communities, and ethnic enclaves; and the undocumented population in the United States. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: SOCI 6770 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This seminar is organized as a laboratory space for graduate students and faculty working in a number of adjacent fields and problems. Seminar discussions will be led not only by the primary instructors, but also by a number of guests drawn from the Penn faculty. For the first weeks of the course, we will focus on seminal works in the interlinked areas of history and memory studies, cultural representations of collective violence, trauma studies, and other related topics. Beginning with the Xth week of the course, we will turn to case studies in a variety of geographic, cultura and historical contexts. Additionally, some later sessions of the course will be devoted to a presentation and discussion of a work in progress of a Penn graduate student, faculty member or a guest lecturer. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: COML 6830 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Topics vary. Please see the Spanish Department's website for the current course description: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/hispanic-portuguese- studies/pc Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: SPAN 6920 1 Course Unit University of Pennsylvania Catalog 2189

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Topics vary. Please see the Spanish Department's website for the current course description: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/hispanic-portuguese- studies/pc Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: SPAN 6940 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

Topics vary. Please see the Spanish Department's website for the current course description: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/hispanic-portuguese- studies/pc Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: SPAN 6970 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

In-depth analysis of the black experience in Latin America and the Spanish, French and English-speaking Caribbean, since slavery to the present. The course opens with a general examination of the existence of Afro-descendants in the Americas, through the study of fundamental historical, political and sociocultural processes. This panoramic view provides the basic tools for the scrutiny of a broad selection of literary, musical, visual, performance, and cinematic works, which leads to the comprehension of the different ethical-aesthetic strategies used to express the Afro-diasporic experience. Essential concepts such as negritude, creolite, and mestizaje, as well as the most relevant theories on identity and identification in Latin America and the Caribbean, will be thoroughly examined, in articulation with the interpretation of artistic works. Power, nationalism, citizenship, violence, religious beliefs, family and community structures, migration, motherhood and fatherhood, national and gender identities, eroticism, and sexuality are some of the main issues discussed un this seminar. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: AFRC 6971, ENGL 7971, SPAN 6971 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

and Visual Cultures This seminar examines cultural representations of Brazil in relation to other imagined geographies, global discourses and transnational l connections - Brazil and Latin America, Brazil and the Black Atlantic, etc. It provides a theoretical framework for comparative analysis, and its central cultural objects include Brazilian literature, visual culture and intellectual history. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: SPAN 6972 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course will analyse the forms, contexts, and politics surrounding anticolonial, left and dissident print cultures of the global south. Course materials will draw on the archive of political magazines, party newspapers, cultural journals, and pamphlets to study how these print forms shaped the cultures, institutions, and communities of revolutionary politics. Engaging the global south revolutionary periodical as form, the course will analyze its role as a forum for political debate, a tool for political organizing, and a crucial medium for literary and aesthetic experiments. We will examine revolutionary periodicals from contexts ranging from colonial India to Apartheid-era South Africa to Pinochet- ruled Chile to appreciate the ways in which periodicals often served as sites for articulating political theory and literary activism ‘from below’. W will focus on movements and political concepts that decisively shaped 20th-century struggles against colonialism, and those that followed in the wake of formal decolonization, including but not limited to Afro-Asianism, Marxist internationalism, black internationalism, Third Worldism, and Tricontinentalism. Classes will be conducted in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and a large part of the course will be dedicated to workshopping archival material from the collections. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: AFRC 7941, COML 7941, ENGL 7941, SAST 7741 1 Course Unit

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu

This course explores the historical and contemporary co-construction of race and language in educational research. As opposed to treating race and language as self-evident and universal concepts, the course adopts a genealogical perspective that examines their historical development within the context of European colonialism and critically analyzes the legacy of these colonial ideologies in contemporary educational research, policy and practice. Students engage with a range of foundational theoretical and methodological texts to develop a robust understanding of the historical and contemporary relationship between race and language. Students also read, analyze and critique educational research that has sought to apply these theoretical and methodological insights. The course will culminate in students undertaking genealogical research projects on questions of race and language connected to their own educational research interests.

Subject

LALS

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

catalog.upenn.edu