Latin American Studies

This course provides an overview of the modern and contemporary history of Latin America and Spain through the lens of postcolonial criticism. Topics covered include: Washington, Napoleon, and Hidalgo; Spain in the 19th century; the Monroe Doctrine; industrialization; political philosophy in Latin America at the start of the 20th century; the Spanish Civil War; the Cold War; democracy vs. dictatorship; environmentalism and human rights; populism and socialist guerrillas; Bolivarian communism.

This course taught in Spanish explores political thought through a Latin American lens. The course begins with indigenous primary sources and their views on the Conquista and maintains those indigenous viewpoints through different eras in Latin American history. The course focuses primarily on the indigenous role, post-colonial impacts, and contemporary Latin America.

This course examines the principal political, economic, social, and cultural phenomena involved in the formation and development of Latin American culture. It includes the interdependent relationship of Chile in the process of Latin American development; homogeneity and heterogeneity in Latin America; the Spanish-Indian encounter and problems of identity; social institutions in the colonial period; modernization and cultural identity; family; psychology; popular religion; and arts, film, literature, world vision, and change in Latin America.

This course discusses memory and human rights from the perspective of Chilean literary and cultural production of the dictatorial and post-dictatorial period. It reviews some of the most important works published and performed within the last four decades. Selections include three main literary genres each week: the novel, poetry, and theater/film. The discussion of these materials also includes theoretical studies about the period in question and the importance and difficulties of human rights and memory as social practices.

This course has been designed to introduce English-speaking students to social health, public health, and primary health care emphasizing particular characteristics of the Caribbean region, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. The course follows an integrated and multidisciplinary approach to individual and community health by means of social and medical science concepts that allow for critical and logical analysis of health determinants and their impact on people's health, health system's organization and functions, and the health-illness scheme that contextualizes health based on cultural characteristics.

This course provides a study of the process of formation and development of social thought in Latin America, from the establishment of nation states to the present day. It analyzes prevailing conceptual frameworks that examine the problems of greatest cultural, economic, political and social significance of Latin America. It looks at the process of evolution in its historical context, analyzing the most representative examples of each stage of its development and discussing their degree of reliability or uncertainty for the diagnosis of political, social, and economic problems of Latin America.

This course examines the main historical events of the region from the beginning of the 19th century. It covers the various controversies surrounding the population of the sub-continent and analyzes the formation of large pre-Columbian civilizations. This part of the course explores the population that preceded the Tawantinsuyu in the Andres and the Empire of the Triple Alliance in Mexico, often dismissed in the analysis. It examines the consequences of the arrival of the Spanish and the Portuguese by considering the large events of the "Conquest" and colonization.