National Autonomous University of Mexico

This course offers a historical and panoramic overview of the relationship between music and social and political processes of Latin America from the colonial period until the 19th century, reflecting upon the importance of these musical expressions in considering the possibiitlies of a Latin American identity. 

This is a literature theory course that examines different theoretical approaches to understanding the novel. The class covers expressive theories, mimetic theories, objective theories, and pragmatic theories, introducing students to a wide range of perspectives in literary criticism. Throughout the course, these theories are explored through the close analysis of selected novels, allowing students to apply theoretical concepts to practical readings. 

This course studies the historical processes, trends, and key figures in Latin American education during the 20th and 21st centuries.

This course reflects upon the characteristics of linguistic, paralinguistic and non-verbal content of communication that works to exercise violence against others.  Through the identification of patterns, linguistic messages, and other methods of communication, the class analyzes a type of nonphysical moral violence equally as important in its overall study.  The course also covers forms of violence prevention. 

This course provides a general and introductory overview of the history and culture of the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of the Central Mexican Highlands. The course is structured in two semesters, each with a distinct yet complementary focus. This first semester course is diachronic, explaining the historical development of the Nahua peoples, from their cultural origins in the Classic period to the events leading up to the Spanish conquest. The second semester, in contrast, examines various aspects of Nahuatl culture from a synchronic perspective.

This course revolves around artistic expression among indigenous communities. The class material involves analysis of ancient American art, but is more based in understanding and questioning the general understanding of art as a concept, and how it relates to indigenous expression as well as hierarchies of sensibility. Ideas such as esthetics, intention, and technique are discussed in order to open students' minds to understanding the root of certain divisive labels, such as artisanal or primitive art.

This course discusses the theoretical and methodological foundations of visual sociology, aiming to define, based on theoretical, epistemological, and methodological research, the status of visual sociology within sociology in general. The course introduces the production of visual and audiovisual research documents by integrating the technique and language of photography and videography into a sociological research project. 

This course introduce students from the major Modern Languages and Literature (English, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese) to fundamental concepts, strategies, and procedures of translation and translation studies, to initiate a process of reflection and practice.

This course proposes a critical approach to the political geography of Mexico: a political, analytical and denouncing position, which understands that neither geography univocally conditions the political nor is the political foreign to spatialization. It provides theoretical and methodological tools to understand how power is exercised in and from space, and how that exercise has configured Mexican political geography in its historical, corporal and structural dimension. In this framework, the traditional categories of analysis - such as the State, territory, sovereignty or scale - are questioned from an analysis of power that allows to problematize its constitution, its contingency and its spatial production. This course invites one to think about the geographies of power in Mexico not as fixed and neutral expressions, but as fields crossed by violence, desire, inequality and resistance. The analysis starts from the spatial, products of power relations in constant (re)production, tense by daily struggles that seek to dispute the very meaning of what we call geography.

This course discusses the theoretical tools to understand the history of the processes of artistic development in Latin America, specifically during the 19th century.  The course integrates a concept of Latin American art based on a historical, aesthetic, and formal understanding of its transformations and offers students a set of resources for critically analyzing and evaluating contemporary Latin American art in accordance with regional development and the specific characteristics of each country.  It also reviews the necessary tools to learn how to view and analyze a work of art—whether painting, architecture, or sculpture—in terms of its formal qualities and to be able to describe it and formulate the most appropriate questions for a better understanding.

The course covers the following topics: the Age of Enlightenment and Neoclassicism; history of the Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos in New Spain; the foundation of other art academies in Latin America; the origins of the French Artistic Mission in Paris and its arrival in Brazil in 1816; the independence movements and historical painting; traveling artists in the Americas: Alexander von Humboldt and Mauricio Rugendas, and Impressionism and Post-Impressionism in Europe and their repercussions in Latin America.