Sample Courses

This course will introduce students to how filmmakers and writers have represented Latin America’s ecosystems and raised awareness about critical environmental issues in the region. The course revolves around five case studies: forest and rivers, the desert and the mountains, agriculture and slaughterhouses, and waste and recycling. Our focus on the environment will serve as a base for discussions about the representation of queer, Latinx, and Indigenous communities, the aftermath of political violence in post-conflict societies, and the current immigration crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.

We will read texts by canonical figures such as Rigoberta Menchú and by contemporary writers like Samanta Schweblin, and look at films by Patricio Guzmán and Pino Solanas, among others, to address the following questions: What possibilities do media like the written word and the visual arts open up for thinking about the environment? What modes are artists employing to confront readers and spectators with environmental degradation and to propel them to take an ethical stance? In what ways is the crisis of the environment intertwined with debates over human rights violations, social and economic inequality, and uneven development?

This course will examine literature and film addressing the legacy of the last South American military dictatorships, especially focusing on Argentina (1976-1983) and Chile (1973-1990). In addition to reading and listening to the victims’ testimonies, we will learn about the memory battles still afflicting the region through the work of second and third-generation writers and filmmakers. The course will chart the emergence of new narratives referred to as “the literature of the children,” written by the generation who grew up during the height of these dictatorial regimes. Students will interrogate important concepts of post-dictatorship cultural production, such as postmemory and transitional justice. Our inquiries will take us to the Trial of the Juntas in Argentina and the problematic democratic transition in Chile, culminating in discussions about neoliberalism as a political and socioeconomic order. During the semester, we will pay close attention to the issue of form, asking how works that mix literature and art, or films that combine documentary and drama, lay bare the difficulties of representing violent political crimes such as torture and disappearance.

This course will examine representations of rural territories (deserts, highlands, and jungles) from the nineteenth century to the present. We will study how the Latin American elites appropriated rural lands to make them part of their civilizational nation-building project by reading foundational poems, regionalist novels, and modernista short stories. Some issues that we will explore include the creation of a creole identity as a bridge between Europeans and Latin Americans, the abandonment of rural zones due to the contradictions of uneven modernization, and the role of literature in capturing the voice of dispossessed rural actors such as Indigenous and Afro-Latin American women. We will read canonical works that mapped the region’s ecosystems and their heterogeneous populations and the work of women writers who used modern literary techniques to question forms of land-based and sexual oppression. We will also study the work of contemporary authors who destabilize traditional debates about civilization versus barbarism, the dispossession of bodies and territories, and Latin America’s insertion into the global economy.

Readings include Fernanda Melchor’s Temporada de huracanes, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s Las aventuras de la China Iron, and Cristina Rivera Garza’s Autobiografía del algodón.

This course will explore how Latin American writers are responding to the Anthropocene, the new geological era characterized by large-scale human imprint on the planet. More specifically, we will study novels of ecohorror that repurpose old figures like the cannibal, the monster, and the zombie to narrate our contemporary climate predicament. Some of these issues include mining and oil extraction, pesticide poisoning, and epidemic disease. We will ask how writers build bridges between ethics and aesthetics by using negative emotions such as anxiety, disgust, and fear. Additionally, discussions will center around important ecocritical concepts, including slow violence and tentacular thinking. Throughout the course, we will ask whether ecohorror combats the detachment and indifference of contemporary citizens or whether it contributes to solastalgia, the distress young people feel in the face of irretrievable ecological loss. Ultimately, students will explore ecohorror’s relationship with new literary modes for narrating the climate crisis, such as climate fiction (cli-fi) and geological writing.

This course will study cultural production that depicts how multinational corporations have exploited workers and landscapes across Latin America. We will read novels, short stories, and poems about mining, oil extraction, and the plantation economy (bananas, coffee, sugar, yerba mate) from the early twentieth century to the present. Some of the historical events we will cover include the rubber boom in the Amazon rainforest, the various massacres of workers from the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Brands International), and mining tragedies in Chile and Peru. Throughout the course, we will explore how the myth of El Dorado – the promise of an Amazonian city of gold – shaped the modern idea of Latin America as an exporter of raw materials and how this fantasy of endless wealth continues to underpin extractivism in our era of human-induced climate change. Finally, we will examine post-extractive imaginaries through the work of Indigenous cultural producers who conceive other ways of relating with the land via practices such as degrowth and communitarian living.

In this course, “Patagonia: Culture at the End of the World,” we will study the history of the region comprising southern Argentina and Chile as well as the Mapuche Indigenous territory known as Wallmapu. Our readings will range from Charles Darwin’s Journal of the Beagle Expedition to the scientific work of nineteenth-century explorers and naturalists, short stories about the Selk’nam Indigenous (canoeing) peoples, and films about the Indigenous genocide on both sides of the Andes. Throughout the semester, we will ask how and why this region, often called “the southernmost tip of the world,” occupies a central part in the history of life on Earth. We will study Patagonia as the site of prehistoric extinctions, the home of escaped Nazi criminals, and the space of European exploration and Indigenous resistance. We will follow characters and historical figures such as British naturalists, Galician anarchists, Romanian gold miners, Russian revolutionaries, Scottish Indian hunters, and Indigenous storytellers who store the memory of disappearing languages and natures.