Latin American and Latino Studies

Prof. Cynthia Stone, Associate Professor of Spanish, is the Program Director. Please direct all questions to her.

     The Latin American and Latino Studies Program offers a Concentration and a student-designed multidisciplinary Major. For the concentration requirements, students take six Latin American or Latino Studies courses plus language instruction in Spanish. A faculty-approved template for a major in LALS is also available to assist students interested in pursuing this option.

The aim of the program is to introduce students to Latin America's multiplicity of peoples and cultures as they are situated in historical and international context, including their new and centuries-old immigrant and migrant diasporas or pre-Anglo enclaves within the United States. Students select from a multidisciplinary array of courses that explore the diversity of the Hispanic- and Portuguese-speaking peoples of the Americas as well as their common cultural and historical roots. Courses in anthropology, cultural studies, education, film, history, linguistics, literature, music, political science, religion, and sociology explore the events and processes that have shaped the region and the lives of its people. The topics addressed in the classroom and at co-curricular events sponsored by LALS reflect themes pertinent to an understanding of the interplay between individual, national and global phenomena.

The research and teaching interests of LALS faculty include Afro-Caribbean history and culture, Chicano studies, development theory, environmentalism, ethics, human rights, indigenous peoples of the Americas, international activism, landscape studies, Latino autobiography, liberation theology, literature of dictatorship, literature and ethnicity, music composition, oral and pictorial narratives, second-language acquisition, sociolinguistics, translation studies, and urban education. Latin American and Latino Studies faculty have conducted research in the Caribbean, Mexico, Central and South America and have published critical studies both in the U.S. and abroad.