Spring 2024 NYU Consortium Classes

 Last Updated: November 15, 2023

Courses are subject to changes and cancellations. For a PDF version of the courses with descriptions, please click here

Through the New York City Consortium for Latin American Studies, master's students from New York University and Columbia are allowed to take pre-approved courses each semester. These courses below are approved by the Institute of Latin American Studies for SIPA and MARSLAC students to cross-register in SPRING 2024. These courses must be registered via a form on the first day of the class. Please see your instructor and follow the instructions on the registration form. Note that fall semester classes at NYU will start on Monday, January 22 and end on Monday, May 6, 2024.

    Approved Consortium Classes at NYU

    LATC-GA 11 - Elementary Quechua II
    Instructor: Odi Gonzalez
    Date/time: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 11:00am – 12:15pm
    Location: 181 Mercer Room 327

    Quechua is the most important and most widely distributed indigenous language in South America, with about 10 million speakers living from the high mountains to the tropical lowlands in Colombia (where the language is called Ingano), Ecuador (where it is called kichwa or runa shimi, "human speech"), Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina (where it is usually spelled Quechua and called, by its speakers, runa simi). Studying Quechua opens a window onto alternative ways of thinking about social worlds, about space and time, family, and humans' relationship with the natural world. Quechua is recommended for students anticipating travel to the Andean region, those interested in language and linguistics, and those interested in indigenous literatures and cultures. Students who satisfactorily complete introductory Quechua will be well-prepared for intensive summer study at one of many summer study abroad programs in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia that will put them in closer contact with the indigenous world.

     

     

    LATC-GA 1014 Queer Corporalities in Latin America: Eroticism, Aesthetics and Politics
    Instructor: Ana Alvarez
    Date/Time: Wednesdays, 10:15am – 12:15 pm               
    Location: Silver, Room 409

    In this course, we will analyze the transformations across the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, of embodied forms of queer identities, particularly travesti and Trans*, in the Americas, as a way of problematizing wider constellations of eroticism, aesthetics expression and political formations of activisms. We will put in dialogue seminal voices in queer theory such as Eve Kosofsky Sedwick, Lauren Berlant, Susan Stryker, and José Muñóz, but also psychoanalytical and feminists discussions including Laplanche and Pontalis, Gilles Deleuze, Jacqueline Rose, Jill Casid and Ariella Azoulay. In our readings, we will attempt to move beyond exhausted ideas of identity and to expand our discussion towards the complexities involved in constructing subjectivities, not least in relation with the entangled agencies of the more-than-human. How can erotic experience create a dialogue with a gendered and sexual subjectivity? What is the place of identity politics and/or of the entangled agencies of the more-than-human in this context? What are the tensions but also the possible gains for a radical politics? How can aesthetic experiences as a site of critical imagination work with and interrogate those potentialities? Materials studied will include literary writing (Manuel Puig, Néstor Perlongher, Pedro Lemebel, Dionne Brand), the visual arts (La chola Poblete, Tadaskia, Winnie Minerva, Felipe Rivas San Martín, Archivo de la Memoria Trans), and film (Karim Ainouz, Susana Aitkin and Carlos Aparicio)

    LATC-GA 1017 Government and Politics of Latin America
    Instructor: Patricio Navia
    Date/Time: Tuesday, 4:55pm – 7:25pm
    Location: KJCC 404

    This class explores the government and politics of Latin America from the 1990s to the present, with a focus on the degree to which countries in the region have succeeded in consolidating democracy since the end of the Cold War. In the 1990s, countries embraced—with different levels of enthusiasm—the Washington Consensus neo-liberal economic reforms, and electoral Democracy became the norm in the region. Many believed Latin America had finally left behind a past of political instability, military coups, populism, revolutionary movements and radical political change. However, consolidating democracy proved to be much more difficult than attaining electoral democracy. In the course we will see that, for the most part, Latin American countries have failed to develop strong institutions and a strong civil society, two characteristics that are often associated with consolidated democracies. The period from 2003 to 2012 (financial crisis notwithstanding) brought unprecedented levels of economic growth in Latin America. The terms of trade were overwhelmingly positive for developing nations. Yet, growth did not result in substantial reductions in poverty and inequality. Why is inequality so persistent in the region? If the good years did not help consolidate democracy, can we expect democracy to fare well in bad years? Although there were problems of democratic consolidation in Peru, Ecuador, and Argentina in the mid 1990s, the election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1998 seemed to signal broader obstacles and problems for insufficiently consolidated democracies in Latin America. After Chávez, different challenges to democratic consolidation have appeared in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, Nicaragua, Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico. Are there similarities among them? Are they radically different? Are there regional patterns that we can identify? Through discussion of Latin American history and democratic theory, we will explore different challenges to democratic consolidation in Latin America.

     

    LATC-GA 1045 International Human Rights: Latin America
    Instructor: Peter Lucas
    Date/Time: Thursdays, 5:00pm – 8:00pm
    Location: KJCC 404

    In this graduate seminar, students will examine human rights case studies in Latin America, popular resistance and social movements in Latin America, the role of media and representation in reporting and promoting human rights, and educational initiatives for human rights. We will especially study the many choices society has after collective violence. Latin America remains a fascinating region to study human rights as the last two decades have stood out as a period of reckoning and bearing witness of past atrocities. In the wake of serious violence, countries continue to struggle with issues of justice, reconciliation, truth, remembering, and healing. Over the years there have been many different responses to collective violence in Latin America and these strategies continue to evolve and change. This course will study the range of these responses not only to reconcile human rights violations of the past but also to build a culture of human rights and peace in the future.

    LATC-GA 2537.002 The Age of Revolutions in Latin America and the Caribbean
    Instructor: Ada Ferrer
    Date/Time: Thursdays, 9:15am – 12:15pm
    Location: KJCC 607

    This colloquium is an extended examination of the Age of Revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean. Rather than a treatment of successive revolutions, it aims to assess the relationship between broad processes and institutions—the rise of nationalism, the overlapping histories of slavery’s decline and entrenchment, the crisis of longstanding imperial structures, and so on—and the wave of revolutions that swept the New World between 1776 and 1825. We will also place those revolutions in the context of global history, in particular in Europe and Africa.

    Critical Voices in Environmental & Racial Justice
    Instructor: Leo Douglass, Pamela Calla, Kaia Shivers
    Date/Time: Monday, 2:00pm - 4:30pm
    Location: KJCC 404

    This course examines the relationship between environmentalism, nature conservation and racial justice. Moreover, this interrogation discusses the critical role that the histories of settler colonialism and ongoing capitalist paradigms have played in the ideologies and approaches to the teaching, practice, and academic study of environmental justice. Centering the experiences and articulations of Indigenous, Brown, Black and frontline communities, and how they challenge regimes of global power, we discuss a range of concepts and theoretical frameworks such as ecological apartheid, food justice, the climate crisis and postcolonial theory. More so, this class examines their experiences and ways of knowing, along with their work in the field—all of which are largely absent from spaces of power, academic discourse and global deliberations about environmental health and conservation. Withal, our exploration looks at how and through what means the aforementioned communities continue to be harmed and systematically silenced as they navigate the gradual erosion of natural ecosystems.

     

    How to Register

    1. Read the detailed list of approved courses and select a course.
    2. Contact Eliza Kwon-Ahn at ILAS with any questions on Columbia administrative matters.
    3. If necessary, contact the CLACS Office at NYU for instructions on completing administrative matters there:

      Ana Luiza Teodoro, Program Administrator
      NYU/CLACS
      King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center (KJCC)
      53 Washington Square South, Floor 4W
      212-998-8687
       
    4. Download and print the CU-NYU Cross Registration Form.
    5. Complete and sign the form.  
    6. Please obtain a call number for CU registration

    Important Details

    • You will need to attend the first day of the class at NYU to obtain all the requirements. 
       
    • The fall 2023 semester at NYU will start on Tuesday, September 5
       
    • The ILAS-CLACS consortium agreement is only for students in MARSLAC and SIPA program.  Students in other programs at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences are not eligible to register for these courses. Students at other schools must consult their school policies.