LACLxS offers an interdisciplinary, two-semester graduate seminar on Latin America’s role in global economic, social, political and cultural processes, from both historical and contemporary perspectives, Latin America in a Globalizing World I & II.
Current Offerings:
Fall 2024: Dr. Alessandro Angelini & Dr. Marcelo Nogueira (AS.360.623)
This interdisciplinary seminar explores Latin America’s role in wider cultural, economic, and political processes, from both historical and contemporary perspectives. In Fall 2024 we will take up the themes of aesthetics, epistemic pluralism, and the question of reality. We have organized the seminar around questions of regimes of truth and fictionality, the politics of knowledge production, radical alterity with a selection of recently published books that reflect key interventions and ongoing conversations across the multidisciplinary field of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies. While the commitment to contemporary works comes at the expense of historical depth to intellectual currents and direct exposure to ‘classics’, the seminar offers a wide-angle snapshot of major currents, as well as engagements with scholars’ emergent thinking on the region today.
Past Offerings:
Spring 2023: Dr. Casey Lurtz (AS.360.626)
The second part of our two-semester sequence, this seminar offers JHU and Baltimore-area scholars working in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx studies a chance to workshop works-in-progress in an interdisciplinary setting. JHU graduate students are encouraged to register and to sign up for a presentation slot. JHU faculty, as well as faculty and graduate students from other Baltimore area institutions, are also encouraged to sign up to share work. The seminar will meet Fridays at 2pm from January 26 through April 27 on the Homewood campus at JHU. For the schedule, see the events calendar.
Fall 2022: Dr. Joshua Simon and Dr. Bécquer Seguín (AS.360.623)
This semester the seminar focuses on the theme of Latin American political thought. After an initial couple weeks of introducing several approaches and problems in the study of Latin American political thought, the course will proceed more or less chronologically from the fifteenth century to the twenty first century, often pairing canonical primary texts with recent monographs. Themes covered will include colonization, natural history, constitutionalism, positivism, mestizaje, Marxism, dependency theory, feminism, and populism, among others. Although we will mostly view each of these themes through the lens of political theory, students are encouraged to use the texts in dialogue with their own disciplinary and methodological interests. Throughout the course, several outside scholars will join us to discuss assigned texts or their own monograph.
Spring 2022: Dr. Christy Thornton (AS.360.626)
The second part of our new two-semester sequence, this seminar offers JHU and Baltimore-area scholars working in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx studies a chance to workshop works-in-progress in an interdisciplinary setting. JHU graduate students are encouraged to register and to sign up for a presentation slot. JHU faculty, as well as faculty and graduate students from other Baltimore area institutions, are also encouraged to sign up to share work. The seminar will meet Thursdays from January 27 through April 28 on the Homewood campus at JHU. For the schedule, see the events calendar.
Fall 2021: Dr. Casey Lurtz & Dr. Marina Bedran (AS.360.623)
This semester will take on eco-critical, environmental studies, and environmental humanities approaches to understanding the region and its place in the world. Readings will ask: Is there a particularly Latin American approach to nature? What role have the environment and understandings of it played in Latin America’s place in the global economy? How have indigenous approaches to environmental activism shaped global discourses around development? How do Latin American art and literature create, reinforce, or deconstruct ideas about the environment? Across various disciplinary contexts, what do we understand as universal, and what do we understand as particular? What is local and what is global? What alternative futures for our planet can Latin America help us to imagine? We will address these questions through engagement with classic scholarship as well as new texts that exemplify particular approaches to Latin American studies.
Spring 2021: Dr. Casey Lurtz & Dr. Christy Thornton (AS.360.623)
This semester, readings will address the place of Latin America in the world by asking: In our scholarship, what is the analytic purchase of the category “Latin America”? How do we understand Latin America in relation to other political/geographic categories, such as “the West” or the “Global South”? In our study of Western Hemisphere societies, how should we understand the national, the regional, and the international? Across various disciplinary contexts, what do we understand as universal, and what do we understand as particular? What is local and what is global? We will address these questions through engagement with classic scholarship as well as new texts that exemplify particular approaches to Latin American studies.