Spring 2026 NYU Consortium Classes
Last Updated: November 14, 2025
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 2026. These courses must be registered via a form starting the week before the classes start. You will also obtain a call number to add at Columbia. Please see your instructor and follow the instructions on the registration form. Note that spring semester classes at NYU will start on Tuesday, January 20 and end on Tuesday, May 5, 2026.
Approved Consortium Classes at NYU
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: Thursday, 6:00pm – 9:00pm
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.
LAT-GA 1045-001 Critical Voices in Environmental & Racial Justice
Instructor: Leo Douglass
Date/Time: Tuesday, 2:00pm - 4:30pm
Location: KJCC 404
This course examines the relationship between environmentalism, nature conservation and racial justice. Additionally, it discusses the critical role that the histories of settler colonialism and ongoing capitalist paradigms have played in the ideologies and approaches that have shaped the teaching and academic study of environmental justice. Centering the experiences and articulations of Indigenous, Brown, Black and frontline communities, and how they challenge regimes of 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 ongoing work in these fields—the vast majority of which is largely absent or minimized with academic discourses and global deliberations about environmental values, protection, health, and management.
Withal, our exploration looks at how and through what means the aforementioned communities continue to be harmed and systematically silenced as they navigate the ongoing erosion of functioning natural ecosystems while often shouldering the frontlines activism, whistle-blowing, and protection. With a focus on the Americas, this course discusses how those who represent Indigenous, Brown, Black, and frontline communities not only continue to bear the environmental burden of the modern age, but also disproportionately shoulder violence for their leadership in demanding truth, justice and environmental protection. Through a combination of: 1) facilitated forums focused on frontline communities and their experiences; 2) critical engagement of theories and concepts giving voice to the oppressed navigating environmental injustices, and 3) an appraisal of literature examining the racial and environmental intersectionality, this syllabus aims to interrogate and disrupt hegemonic power within the context of environmental concerns.
LATC-GA 2030-001: Feminist Constellations, Extractivism and Affects
Instructor: Pamela Calla
Date/Time: Thursday, 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Location: 53 Washington Square S (KJCC), Room 404
In a context of late racial-patriarchal capitalism, new forms of accumulation have emerged that deepen inequalities. Securitization and financialization are added to this tendency, eroding public care infrastructure and destabilizing ecosystems and communities, particularly poor urban and rural, indigenous, queer of color, workers. Another central aspect of this process is the expansion of the extractive frontiers and the attempts of destruction of indigenous modes of human and non-human community making. In the Americas, Afro-Diasporic and Indigenous social movements are weaving together diverse feminisms with anti-racisms and anti-extractivisms to forge new and emergent modes of struggle. In this seminar, we will link these struggles with the discussion of notions such as affective economies, communities of care, ecological disasters and the entanglement between them. We will also explore that despite these multiple crises, livable spaces are still being created.
LATC-GA 2537-002: Topics in Latin America: Brazil
Instructors: Barbara Weinstein, Dylon Robbins
Date/Time: Monday, 2:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Location: 53 Washington Square S (KJCC), Room 404
This course explores various topics throughout Latin American history; the specific topic of course content is variable year-by-year.
How to Register
- Read the detailed list of approved courses and select a course.
- Contact Eliza Kwon-Ahn at ILAS with any questions on Columbia administrative matters.
- If necessary, contact the CLACS Office at NYU for instructions on completing administrative matters there:
Gray Kidd, Assistant Director
NYU/CLACS
King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center (KJCC)
53 Washington Square South, Floor 4W
212-998-8687 - Download and print the CU-NYU Cross Registration Form.
- Complete and sign the form.
- 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 spring 2026 semester at NYU will start on Tuesday, January 20, 2026.
- 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.