Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

Courses Taught

• ENG 111 Writing through Literature
  Writing-intensive introduction to literature using poetry, drama, short stories, and novella. Emphasis is placed on the process method of writing, basic techniques of literary analysis, and library research. Offered regularly. Fulfills first-year writing requirement. Open to first year students only.
• ENG 250 Topics in 20th & 21st Century Literature
  Intermediate study of a variety of authors, themes, genres, and movements during the 20th and/or early 21st centuries. Courses may cover American, British, transnational, and/or post-colonial literatures. Fulfills Humanities requirement.
• ENG 266 Latinx Literatures of the United States
  This course introduces students to the major canons of Latinx literature that emerged in the twentieth century, together with their cultural and historical contexts from the nineteenth century to the present. Students will analyze novels, short stories, poems, and films to investigate how Latinx cultural production explores issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and colonialism. As we will see, literary expressions of Latinidad and Chicanidad explore not only these issues but also group-specific standpoints and modes of consciousness inextricable from the experiences that constitute them, that is, from historical formations of racialization and mestizaje; multilingualism and code-switching; immigration and diaspora; revolution and exile; citizenship and undocumented status; labor and economic exploitation. Along the way, students will examine the differences and similarities that have shaped the experiences and aesthetic choices of different Latinx communities in the United States, while thinking more broadly about their transnational contexts in the US-Mexico borderlands, the Caribbean, and Latin America. FULFILLS HUMANITIES, CONCEPTUALIZING DIVERSITY REQUIREMENTS. ENG 266 and LAS 266 are cross-listed. This course may be used to fulfil the first year writing requirement. For students pursuing this option, the fourth-hour requirement will be met by weekly meetings during the Common Hour (Thursdays, 11:30 to 12:30).
• ENG 267 Identity and Difference: Ethnic Literature of the United States
  This course will survey a number of works from African American, Native American, Latinx, and Asian American literary canons. Each unit will investigate how minoritarian experiences are constructed through literary forms and representations across diverse twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literatures. Across units, we will identify literary expressions that grapple with the historical experiences of colonialism and slavery; racialization and double consciousness; ethnic difference and marginalization; dialect and code-switching; migration and diasporic writing; alienation and assimilation. Approaching these issues through the prism of ethnic literature encourages us to consider not only how American identity formation is constituted by a historical legacy of empire, but also how creative writing responds to—and even attempts to disrupt—such a legacy. It also encourages us to consider how a monolithic and even marginalizing category such as “ethnic literature” is itself rife with problematic assumptions about identity and difference, homogeneity and heterogeneity, national culture and multi-culturalism. As we move through each unit, we will examine the differences and similarities across the literatures of various ethnic and racial identities in the United States, while analyzing how they invoke their broader transnational contexts and how they develop complex intersections with issues of class, gender, and sexuality. In this way, we will assess how different ethnic literatures challenge more traditional notions of American cultural production, thereby also challenging our understanding of American identity itself.
• ENG 299 Critical Methods
  Introduction to advanced literary study. Attention is placed on close reading, using the library and electronic resources and incorporating scholarly perspectives. Course also considers a variety of theoretical approaches to literature and their place within contemporary literary scholarship. Offered regularly.
• ENG 350 Topics in 20th & 21st Century Literature
  Advanced study of a variety of authors, themes, genres, and movements during the 20th and/or early 21st centuries. Courses may cover American, British, transnational, and/or post-colonial literatures. Fulfills Humanities requirement
• ENG 363 The Other America: Transnational and Hemispheric American Studies
  Students in this course will examine U.S., Caribbean, and Latin American literature in a comparative and interdisciplinary context. Beginning in the late-nineteenth century and moving through more contemporary voices, we will read novels, poems, and critical works that address the historical and cultural relationship between the American North and South, i.e., between global geographies that have been divided into core and peripheral zones. The concept of the 'Western hemisphere' gained cohesion through the displacement and erasure of indigenous populations across the global South. We will therefore assess how the recovery of knowledge, history, and freedom remains central to literary works that mobilize a hemispheric imagination. Students will explore how imperialism, racialism, polyculturalism, and multilingualism not only shaped cultural production in the Americas but also provided a shared experience of loss and fragmentation that becomes the object of modernist representation across national divides. Moreover, students will examine the literary devices and narrative structures that constitute cross-regional anxieties concerning historical origins, geography, chronology, and memory across the continent. In addition to primary texts, we will engage criticism across the fields of Atlantic, borderlands, and diaspora studies to identify and understand key concepts that span the fraught yet emerging field of transnational American literature.
• ENG 365 Natural Supernaturalism: Marvel, Myth, and Magic in the Literature of the Americas
  This course explores how American authors combined literary realism with mythical, marvelous, and magical representations of the world, rendering natural phenomena supernatural. Considering Thomas Carlyle’s concept of “natural supernaturalism” and its impact on Romanticist and Transcendentalist thought, this course explores how a similar concept developed among a set of twentieth-century texts across the Americas. Originating amid historic struggles for liberation, these texts can be understood as literary expressions of postcolonial thought that transform surrealistic practices of Western avant gardism to assert the aesthetic autonomy of non-Western communities. We will begin by examining the foundations of this literary turn as a set of African diasporic and Caribbean narrative strategies. Thereafter, we will trace the expansion and propagation of the mythic, the marvelous, and the magical across Latin American and Native American cultural contexts, ending the semester with a view towards more recent developments in contemporary popular film. Students will bring these texts—together with secondary sources—into comparative dialogue, noting cross-cultural connections between different texts and films. As we encounter these works, we will explore questions such as: What literary strategies and narrative techniques are used to naturalize the supernatural? How do these strategies change when moving across different global geographies and cultures? What folkloric traditions and scientific developments influenced what some critics call the “ontological foundations” of these literary forms, and what elements of faith, irreverence, and metafiction constitute their more “epistemological foundations”? Fulfills Humanities, and either Global Understanding or Conceptualizing Diversity. ENG 365 and LAS 365 cross-listed.
• ENG 404 Seminar: American Literature
  Intensive studies of announced topics in American literature. Prerequisite: one course from 290-299.
• FYS 193-3 Science Fiction Beyond Genre: What It Means to be Human
  Toward the end of the twentieth century, many science fiction and fantasy writers took interest in the subject of “disembodied consciousness" an imagined byproduct of life in the virtual terrain of “cyberspace." New currents in science fiction and fantasy, however, are returning to an older engagement with the subject of “embodiment," especially within the representation of technologically advanced, near-future societies marked by ecological crises and dystopian regimes. A renewed focus on the status of the body within the context of contemporary, imminent, and potential scientific revolutions revisits the historical tensions between Romantic and Enlightenment thought, famously portrayed, for example, in the nineteenth-century works of E.T.A. Hoffman, Mary Shelley, and H.G. Wells. Returning to this subject, as questions of racialization and proletarianization grow larger in the popular imagination, the broad field of science fiction and fantasy—often termed “speculative fiction"—interrogates with renewed intensity the social legibility and legitimacy of bodies. As such, speculative modes of writing, especially those written by authors that belong to marginalized groups, give expression to the embodied experiences of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability: experiences that often shape identity by way of exploitation, alienation, and disempowerment. In this course, we will engage with literature, film, and other media to examine the speculative representation of embodied experience. As we explore the projected realities of genetic engineering and cloning; of cyborgs and hybrid life-forms; of orphaned monstrosities and disposable androids, we will focus on what it means to be human, precisely as the human subject enters a new stage of posthuman and transhuman redefinition. How and why might speculative fiction endow the non-human body with a greater sense of humanity? Why do some works assume that subhumanized bodies, such as monsters and zombies, deserve unmitigated violence (even to comedic or effect)? How does speculative fiction interrogate what it means to exceed the human, i.e., to be “more human than human" within an economic structure that renders such excess illegitimate for society yet suitable for the maximization of profit? In other words, how and why does the representation of embodied experience represent the way that society defines human, posthuman, or non-human subjects? In this class, we will read, watch, and interact with various media to explore these questions, while developing our critical thinking skills to improve our writing and composition.
• LAS 266 Latinx Literatures of the United States
  This course introduces students to the major canons of Latinx literature that emerged in the twentieth century, together with their cultural and historical contexts from the nineteenth century to the present. Students will analyze novels, short stories, poems, and films to investigate how Latinx cultural production explores issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and colonialism. As we will see, literary expressions of Latinidad and Chicanidad explore not only these issues but also group-specific standpoints and modes of consciousness inextricable from the experiences that constitute them, that is, from historical formations of racialization and mestizaje; multilingualism and code-switching; immigration and diaspora; revolution and exile; citizenship and undocumented status; labor and economic exploitation. Along the way, students will examine the differences and similarities that have shaped the experiences and aesthetic choices of different Latinx communities in the United States, while thinking more broadly about their transnational contexts in the US-Mexico borderlands, the Caribbean, and Latin America. FULFILLS HUMANITIES, CONCEPTUALIZING DIVERSITY REQUIREMENTS. ENG 266 and LAS 266 are cross-listed. This course may be used to fulfil the first year writing requirement. For students pursuing this option, the fourth-hour requirement will be met by weekly meetings during the Common Hour (Thursdays, 11:30 to 12:30).
• LAS 363 The Other America: Transnational and Hemispheric American Studies
  Students in this course will examine U.S., Caribbean, and Latin American literature in a comparative and interdisciplinary context. Beginning in the late-nineteenth century and moving through more contemporary voices, we will read novels, poems, and critical works that address the historical and cultural relationship between the American North and South, i.e., between global geographies that have been divided into core and peripheral zones. The concept of the 'Western hemisphere' gained cohesion through the displacement and erasure of indigenous populations across the global South. We will therefore assess how the recovery of knowledge, history, and freedom remains central to literary works that mobilize a hemispheric imagination. Students will explore how imperialism, racialism, polyculturalism, and multilingualism not only shaped cultural production in the Americas but also provided a shared experience of loss and fragmentation that becomes the object of modernist representation across national divides. Moreover, students will examine the literary devices and narrative structures that constitute cross-regional anxieties concerning historical origins, geography, chronology, and memory across the continent. In addition to primary texts, we will engage criticism across the fields of Atlantic, borderlands, and diaspora studies to identify and understand key concepts that span the fraught yet emerging field of transnational American literature.
• LAS 365 Natural Supernaturalism: Marvel, Myth, and Magic in the Literature of the Americas
  This course explores how American authors combined literary realism with mythical, marvelous, and magical representations of the world, rendering natural phenomena supernatural. Considering Thomas Carlyle’s concept of “natural supernaturalism” and its impact on Romanticist and Transcendentalist thought, this course explores how a similar concept developed among a set of twentieth-century texts across the Americas. Originating amid historic struggles for liberation, these texts can be understood as literary expressions of postcolonial thought that transform surrealistic practices of Western avant gardism to assert the aesthetic autonomy of non-Western communities. We will begin by examining the foundations of this literary turn as a set of African diasporic and Caribbean narrative strategies. Thereafter, we will trace the expansion and propagation of the mythic, the marvelous, and the magical across Latin American and Native American cultural contexts, ending the semester with a view towards more recent developments in contemporary popular film. Students will bring these texts—together with secondary sources—into comparative dialogue, noting cross-cultural connections between different texts and films. As we encounter these works, we will explore questions such as: What literary strategies and narrative techniques are used to naturalize the supernatural? How do these strategies change when moving across different global geographies and cultures? What folkloric traditions and scientific developments influenced what some critics call the “ontological foundations” of these literary forms, and what elements of faith, irreverence, and metafiction constitute their more “epistemological foundations”? Fulfills Humanities, and either Global Understanding or Conceptualizing Diversity. ENG 365 and LAS 365 cross-listed.