Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies Courses for Fall 2026
| Title | Instructor | Location | Time | All taxonomy terms | Description | Section Description | Cross Listings | Fulfills | Registration Notes | Syllabus | Syllabus URL | Course Syllabus URL | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LALS 0270-401 | The Immigrant City | Domenic Vitiello | T 10:15 AM-1:14 PM | This course focuses on immigrant, migrant, and refugee communities in United States cities and suburbs. We survey migration and community experiences among a broad range of racial and ethnic groups in different city and suburban neighborhoods. Class readings, discussions, regular trips, and assignments explore topics including labor markets, commerce, housing, community organizations, social movements, race and ethnic relations, neighborhood change, refugee resettlement, and transnational communities. The class introduces students to a variety of social science approaches to studying cities and communities, including readings in sociology, geography, anthropology, social history, and political science. | ASAM0270401, SOCI0270401, URBS0270401 | Society sector (all classes) | ||||||||
| LALS 0400-401 | Colonial Latin America | Marcy Norton | MW 1:45 PM-2:44 PM | The colonial period (1492- 1800) saw huge population movements (many of them involuntary) within the Americas and across the Atlantic. As a result, Latin America was created from the entanglement of technologies, institutions, knowledge systems, and cosmologies from Indigenous, European, and African cultures. We will learn about colonial institutions such as slavery and encomienda. We will also explore the different strategies pursued by individuals and communities to build meaningful lives in the face of often dire social and environmental circumstances. Class readings are primary sources and the focus of discussions, papers, and exams will be their interpretation. | AFRC0400401, HIST0400401 | History & Tradition Sector (all classes) | ||||||||
| LALS 1090-401 | Urban Sociology | Alec Ian Gershberg | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | This course is a comprehensive introduction to the sociological study of urban areas. This includes more general topics as the rise of cities and theories urbanism, as well as more specific areas of inquiry, including American urbanism, segregation, urban poverty, suburbanization and sprawl, neighborhoods and crime, and immigrant ghettos. The course will also devote significant attention to globalization and the process of urbanization in less developed counties. | AFRC1090401, SOCI1090401, URBS1090401 | |||||||||
| LALS 1120-401 | Latin American Politics | Tulia G Falleti | T 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | This course examines the dynamics of political and economic change in twentieth century Latin America, with the goal of achieving an understanding of contemporary politics in the region. We will analyze topics such as the incorporation of the region to the international economy and the consolidation of oligarchic states (1880s to 1930s), corporatism, populism, and elict pacts (1930s and 1940s), social revolution, democratic breakdown, and military rule (1960s and 1970s), transitions to democracy and human rights advocacy (1980s), makret-oriented reforms (1990s), and the turn to the left of current governments (2000s). The course will draw primarily from the experiences of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Mexico. No prior knowledge of the region is required. | PSCI1120401 | |||||||||
| LALS 1261-401 | Radical Arts in the Americas | Jennifer Lyn Sternad Ponce De Leon | MW 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | This course explores the complex and fruitful relationship between literature and the visual arts, including painting, sculpture, installations, and performance art. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. | ARTH2990401, CIMS1261401, COML1261401, ENGL1261401, THAR1261401 | |||||||||
| LALS 1320-401 | Portuguese for the Professions | Carlos Bento Dos Santos Pio | TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | Portuguese for the Professions is designed for advanced-level students to develop their ability to use a wide technical vocabulary. The course will cover an array of topics in the areas of Economy, Politics, Science, Technology, Law and others as they pertain to the societies and cultures of the Lusophone countries, with particular emphasis placed on Brazil. Through readings, movies, discussions, essays and presentations, students will enhance their ability to write about and discuss these topics while employing the appropriate technical vocabulary. | PRTG1320401 | |||||||||
| LALS 1475-401 | Brazil: The Long Struggle for Democracy, 1500-Present | Melissa Teixeira | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | In the past decade, Brazil has emerged a leading global power. As the world's fifth-largest country, by size and population, and the ninth-largest by GDP, Brazil exerts tremendous influence on international politics and the global economy, seen in its position as an emerging BRIC nation and a regional heavyweight in South America. Brazil is often in the news for its strides in social welfare, leading investments in the Global South, as host of the World Cup and Olympics, and, most recently, for its political instability. It is also a nation of deep contradictions, in which myth of racial democracy -- the longstanding creed that Brazilian society has escaped racial discrimination -- functions alongside pervasive social inequality, state violence, political corruption, and an unforgiving penal system. This course examines six centuries of Brazilian history. It highlights the interplay between global events -- colonialism, slavery and emancipation, capitalism, and democratization -- and the local geographies, popular cultures, and social movements that have shaped this multi-ethnic and expansive nation. In particular, the readings will highlight Brazil's place in Latin America and the Lusophone World, as well as the ways in which Brazil stands as a counterpoint to the United States, especially in terms of the legacy of slavery and race relation. In this lecture, we will also follow the current political and economic crises unfolding in Brazil, at a moment when it has become all the more important to evaluate just how South America's largest nation has shaped and been shaped by global events. | AFRC1475401, HIST1475401 | |||||||||
| LALS 1620-401 | The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Empire 1450-1700 | Antonio Feros | TR 8:30 AM-9:59 AM | This course will provide students with a solid knowledge of the history of early modern Spain (1450-1700). Through readings of primary and secondary texts that offer a complex vision of the cultural, religious, intellectual, and economic contexts and processes, students will be able to appreciate the intricacies of Spain's historical evolution. The course focuses on the rise and decline of the Spanish monarchy: the conditions that enabled Spain to become the most powerful monarchy in early modern times, and the conditions that led to its decline. This course also touches upon other important aspects critical to understanding early modern Spain: relationships among Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Iberian Peninsula; the conquest and colonization of the New World; and early modern debates about Spain's rights to occupy America and the so-called "destruction of the Indies." | HIST1620401 | History & Tradition Sector (all classes) | ||||||||
| LALS 2415-401 | Fascism and Anti-Fascism | Jennifer Lyn Sternad Ponce De Leon | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | This course examines fascism and anti-fascist struggles through the study of film, literature, political theory, visual art, and history. While situating fascism in a global context, it focuses on its history in North and South America and Europe from the early 20th century into the 21st. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. | CIMS2415401, COML2415401, ENGL2415401 | |||||||||
| LALS 2451-401 | Haiti's Odious Debt and Beyond (1825-2025) | Marc R Flandreau | R 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | This seminar will ponder Haiti's experience of debt and underdevelopment going back to the 19th century. Taking cues from the debate started by the New York Times in 2023, we will read and discuss texts describing debt, debt crisis, focusing on the interaction between global and local politics, the problem of debt forgiveness, etc. The approach will be chronological, with readings that will engage with the manner in which alternative capital markets set up reverberated locally and vice versa. We will also invite a number of Haitian and other scholars through interactive zoom sessions. While the seminar is focused in the case of Haiti we will also discuss broader implications. | ECON0471401, HIST2451401 | |||||||||
| LALS 3020-401 | Diplomacy in the Americas - The Penn Model OAS Program (SNF Paideia Program Course) | Catherine E.M. Bartch | TR 4:30 PM-5:59 PM | Diplomacy in the Americas is an academically based community-service course where students explore what it means to educate youth for global civic and political engagement. Students apply theoretical and pedagogical principles in curriculum design, classroom teaching, and collaborative learning with public high school students on the topics of Latin American politics and the role of the Organization of American States (OAS). Analyzing and strategizing like a diplomat and guided by theories of democracy and the other three OAS pillars of economic development, security, and human rights, students will collectively examine and propose solutions to the most pressing issues in the Americas. This course is also an SNF Paideia Program Course. | PSCI2420401 | |||||||||
| LALS 3158-401 | ¡Huelga! The Farmworker Movement in the United States | Amy C Offner | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This intensive research seminar invites students to explore the history of farmworkers in the United States during the twentieth century. Research will primarily but not necessarily exclusively focus on the west coast, a region in which many archival sources have been digitized. Students may explore a wide variety of topics, including but not limited to: farmworker unions; the relationship between farmworker mobilizations and other movements in the US and abroad; the experiences of workers from the Philippines and Latin America and the role of US imperial and immigration policies in the lives of farmworkers; farmworkers' confrontations with and participation in systems of racism; the Great Depression in rural communities; the history of gender and family in farmworker communities; the history of environment and health; struggles over citizenship and social rights; counter-mobilizations of growers and the right; religion in farmworker communities; legislative and legal strategies to obtain rights denied agricultural workers in federal law; artistic, musical, and cultural production; or the relationship between consumers and the workers who produced their food. | HIST3158401 | |||||||||
| LALS 3200-401 | Making Latinidades: Culture, Community, and Consciousness | Krista Cortes | TR 8:30 AM-9:59 AM | What does it mean to be Latinx in the United States? This introductory course examines how Latinx communities have developed critical consciousness about their histories, identities, and experiences from the sixteenth century to the present, with particular attention to the often-erased perspectives and knowledge production of Afro-Latinx peoples. Students will explore how communities, including Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Cubans, Mexican Americans, Central Americans, and others have theorized their experiences of colonialism, migration, racialization, and belonging in the US context. Grounded in a scholar-practitioner approach that bridges academic research with community-based cultural work, this course centers the ways Latinx communities have generated their own frameworks for understanding their realities. We will examine how Afro-Latinx communities have developed consciousness about anti-Black racism within Latinidad while articulating solidarities across difference and how this critical awareness has shaped both scholarly inquiry and grassroots organizing. The course investigates how consciousness emerges through cultural practices—from spiritual traditions that encode historical memory and resistance, to contemporary music, literature, and digital media that articulate new political possibilities. Key themes include the development of racial consciousness and the theorization of Blackness within latinidad, feminist and queer consciousness, language as a site of critical awareness, transnational political consciousness, and the role of cultural spaces in cultivating collective understanding. We will explore how Latinx communities have created knowledge about themselves through testimonios, cultural production, and community practice, and how this consciousness has fueled movements for labor rights, citizenship, reproductive justice, and educational access. Students will engage diverse materials, including historical documents, ethnographic research, testimonios, film, and creative expressions, to develop their own critical frameworks for analyzing the heterogeneity of Latinx experiences and the ongoing work of building liberatory consciousness. | AFRC3200401, GSWS3200401 | |||||||||
| LALS 3730-401 | Studies in Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latinx Literature | Ashley R Brock | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | Studies in Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latinx Literature is an upper-division seminar taking a literary-studies approach to Latin American cultural production of the 19-21st centuries. Traditions covered may include Spanish American, Brazilian, and U.S. Latinx literature. Course content may vary. Please see the department website for current course offerings: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/hispanic-portuguese-studies/undergraduate/hispanic-studies | SPAN3730401 | |||||||||
| LALS 3800-401 | Mod & Contemp Ltam Cltr | Ashley R Brock | TR 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | Studies in Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latinx Culture is an upper-division seminars focusing on significant issues or historical moments in Latin American and Latinx culture. Course content may vary. Please see specific Section Details. | SPAN3800401 | |||||||||
| LALS 3800-402 | Contemporary Colombian Lliterature | Oscar Montoya | TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | Studies in Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latinx Culture is an upper-division seminars focusing on significant issues or historical moments in Latin American and Latinx culture. Course content may vary. Please see specific Section Details. | SPAN3800402 | |||||||||
| LALS 3804-401 | Mexico: Revolution and Culture | Ericka Beckman | MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | Studies the central role played by cultural production in forging and imagining national revolutionary projects, from the 1910s to the 1970s. Focusing on literature, photography, painting, and film, we will examine the works of figures such as Diego Rivera, José Vasconcellos, Tina Modotti, Sergei Eisenstein, Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, Rosario Castellanos, Nellie Campobello, José Emilio Pacheco, and Carlos Monsiváis, among others. | SPAN3804401 | |||||||||
| LALS 3808-401 | Urban Life in Latin American Literature | Jean O'bryan Knight | MW 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | Cities exist not just in their geography, but in their spirit, and that spirit is captured in literature. In this course we will read compelling works from Mexico City, Lima, and Buenos Aires that represent life in these Latin American capitals at different points between 1950 and the present. As we explore fiction and non-fiction writing by both established authors and emerging writers, we will learn about the forces and events that have shaped narratives of the urban experience in Latin America. | SPAN3808401 | |||||||||
| LALS 3812-401 | Afro-Latin America: Culture, History, and Society. | Odette Casamayor | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | A transnational and interdisciplinary examination of the black experience in Latin America and the Spanish, French and English-speaking Caribbean, since slavery to the present. Combining cultural analysis with the study of fundamental theoretical works on race and racialization, students will gain a thorough comprehension of historical, political and sociocultural processes shaping the existence of Afro-descendants in the Americas. The scrutiny of systemic racial exclusion and marginalization will allow the understanding of how these dividing practices condition cultural production. | AFRC3812401, SPAN3812401 | |||||||||
| LALS 4525-401 | Black Visual & Performance Arts in Latin America & the Caribbean | Odette Casamayor | T 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | This course offers an interdisciplinary study of Black visual and performance arts in Latin America and the Caribbean, examining these creative practices as critical sites of knowledge production, identity formation, social resistance, and diasporic worldmaking. Centering Afro-Latin American and Afro-Caribbean artists and performance practitioners, students will investigate how visual and embodied practices confront coloniality, articulate and dismantle constructions of race and gender, interrogate experiences of migration and memory, and envision speculative and liberatory futures. Course materials include painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture, installation, performance, and new media practices from across the Caribbean, Latin America, and diasporic communities in the United States and Europe. These works are studied in conversation with art criticism, aesthetic theory, and critical frameworks that illuminate the epistemological dimensions of Afro-diasporic creative expression. Bringing together historical and theoretical frameworks on slavery, colonialism, creolization, global Afro-diasporic circulation, and performance as epistemology, the course pairs conceptual grounding with in-depth case studies of key historical and contemporary artists. | AFRC4525401, AFRC5525401, ARTH3091401, ARTH5091401, COML4525401, COML5525401, LALS5525401 | |||||||||
| LALS 4650-401 | Race and Racism in the Contemporary World | Michael G. Hanchard | R 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This undergraduate seminar is for advanced undergraduates seeking to make sense of the upsurge in racist activism, combined with authoritarian populism and neo-fascist mobilization in many parts of the world. Contemporary manifestations of the phenomena noted above will be examined in a comparative and historical perspective to identify patterns and anomalies across various multiple nation-states. France, The United States, Britain, and Italy will be the countries examined. | AFRC4650401, PSCI4190401 | |||||||||
| LALS 5525-401 | Black Visual & Performance Arts in Latin America & the Caribbean | Odette Casamayor | T 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | This course offers an interdisciplinary study of Black visual and performance arts in Latin America and the Caribbean, examining these creative practices as critical sites of knowledge production, identity formation, social resistance, and diasporic worldmaking. Centering Afro-Latin American and Afro-Caribbean artists and performance practitioners, students will investigate how visual and embodied practices confront coloniality, articulate and dismantle constructions of race and gender, interrogate experiences of migration and memory, and envision speculative and liberatory futures. Course materials include painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture, installation, performance, and new media practices from across the Caribbean, Latin America, and diasporic communities in the United States and Europe. These works are studied in conversation with art criticism, aesthetic theory, and critical frameworks that illuminate the epistemological dimensions of Afro-diasporic creative expression. Bringing together historical and theoretical frameworks on slavery, colonialism, creolization, global Afro-diasporic circulation, and performance as epistemology, the course pairs conceptual grounding with in-depth case studies of key historical and contemporary artists. | AFRC4525401, AFRC5525401, ARTH3091401, ARTH5091401, COML4525401, COML5525401, LALS4525401 | |||||||||
| LALS 6610-401 | Language Diversity and Education |
Hannah A Brenneman Maria Cioe Pena Suzanne Inkyung Oh |
M 11:45 AM-1:44 PM | Exploration of issues affecting educational policy and classroom practice in multilingual, multicultural settings, with an emphasis on ethnographic research. Selected U.S. and international cases illustrate concerns relating to learners' bilingual/bicultural/biliterate development in formal educational settings. Topics include policy contexts, program structures, teaching and learning in the multilingual classroom, discourses and identities in multilingual education policy and practice, and the role of teachers, researchers, and communities in implementing change in schools. | EDUC5252401 | |||||||||
| LALS 6770-401 | International Migration | Tahseen Shams | F 8:30 AM-11:29 AM | A comprehensive review of theories and research on international migration. The course introduces the basic precepts of neoclassical economics, the new economics of labor migration, segmented labor market theory, world systems theory, social capital theory and the theory of cumulative causation. Readings examine patterns and processes of global migration during the classic age from 1800ï¿?1914 as well as during the postwar period from 1945 to the present. The course also covers a history and evaluation of immigration policies around the world, and devotes signification attention to theoretical and empirical perspectives on immigrant adaptation. Within this larger topic, we will also discuss internal migration and urbanization; the relationship between gender and migration; the spatial distribution of immigrants within the United States, immigrant communities, and ethnic enclaves; and the undocumented population in the United States. | SOCI6770401 | |||||||||
| LALS 6972-401 | Brazil and the World: Geographic Imaginations in Literature and Visual Cultures | Iuri Bauler Pereira | M 12:00 PM-2:59 PM | This seminar examines cultural representations of Brazil in relation to other imagined geographies, global discourses and transnational connections - Brazil and Latin America, Brazil and the Black Atlantic, etc. It provides a theoretical framework for comparative analysis, and its central cultural objects include Brazilian literature, visual culture and intellectual history. | SPAN6972401 |