Latin American Studies Courses Available for Spring 2026
Spring 2026 registration is open! Find all the information you need to register here.
Latin American Studies prepares students for a job market that increasingly demands keen global sensibilities and the ability to work between cultures. Introducing diverse methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of Latin America, while providing a core interdisciplinary foundation in the humanities and social sciences, Latin American Studies prepares students to engage a broad spectrum of local and global phenomena with intellectual rigor and flexibility. Students may choose courses from twenty cooperating departments, taught by some seventy affiliated faculty specializing in the region. Interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives on the region offer students a depth of knowledge of hemispheric relations and build area expertise. The curriculum approaches Latin America as both a local and foreign culture, illuminating critical transnational issues such as immigration, climate change, cultural flows, security, and economic development that transcend the boundaries of the region.
Latin American Studies Major. Requires a minimum of 30 credit hours in 10 Latin American content courses.
Latin American Studies Minor. Requires a minimum of 15 credit hours in 5 courses.
To see all available Latin American Studies Major and Minor courses and register, visit the Class Schedule and type “LAST” in the Course field.
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ANTH-2350 — Architecture & Power the Ancient World: This class will explore how political, religious, ideological and cultural ideas among the world’s earliest urban civilizations were inscribed in the landscape in the form of monumental construction. To achieve these objectives the class will study five different regions of the ancient world with the goal of evaluating how built space (buildings, monuments, and public plazas) helped develop and maintain socio-political hierarchy, i.e., "civilization".
ANTH-3035/ ANTH-7035 — Race and Migration: Race and Migration explores how race and culture impact the settlement experiences of migrating people. We will focus primarily on Latinos, West Indians, and Asians and use New York City as a primary sight of investigation but also examine case studies of migration within the Caribbean and Latin America. Questions the course will address include: how do people go from having diverse national and cultural identities to being people with a “race?” How does becoming a “raced” person shape identity, economic mobility, and social and cultural belonging? How are people differently affected by being placed in social categories in adoptive homes? How do migrants both preserve and create new culture? How do they remain connected to their countries of origin? Where do they find power? In pursuit of these questions, we will consider theories on race, culture, diaspora, nation, transnationalism, exclusion, and belonging.
ANTH-3060 — Ethnology of South America: Ethnology of the indigenous peoples of lowland South America and adjacent southern Central America. The course examines cultural developments from prehistory to the present. Models for the classification of indigenous cultures, societies, and languages are critically reviewed.
ANTH-3090/ ANTH-6090 — Carnival Time; Rites and Festivals New Orleans: Selected Cultural Systems. Courses may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.
ANTH-3094 — Anthropology and Architecture: Selected Cultural Systems. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.
ANTH-3435/ ANTH-6435 — Disasters and Past Societies: Consideration of case studies in how past societies have prepared for or responded to disasters, critical reflection on "natural" and "cultural" forces that contribute to catastrophic events and that shape the aftermath of disasters, comparative assessment of relationships between culture and environment, and application of resilience theory and models of cultural collapse towards understanding the effects of disasters on past societies.
ANTH-3580/ ANTH-6580 — The Politics of Fieldwork: This course will give an overview of some of the main discussions in anthropology around the theories, methods, and politics of ethnographic fieldwork. Students will engage with critical perspectives on issues of positionality, reflexivity, representation, and embodiment, which are essential aspects in designing a research project, engaging in fieldwork, interpreting and analyzing data, and disseminating the research products. Throughout the course, we will analyze how each one of these issues and phases is enmeshed in interlocking power dynamics involving race, gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality. We will interrogate the objectivity paradigm, learn about activist, collaborative, decolonizing, and Indigenous methodologies, their multiple challenges and critiques, and discuss anthropologists’ reflections on their own fieldwork experiences. The main goal of the course is to guide students in the process of developing a creative, ethical approach to fieldwork.
ANTH-6060 — Ethnology of South America: Ethnology of the indigenous peoples of lowland South America and adjacent southern Central America. The course examines cultural developments from prehistory to the present. Models for the classification of indigenous cultures, societies, and languages are critically reviewed.
ANTH-7091 — Writing Articles for Scholarly Journals
ANTH-7094 — Anthropology and Architecture
ANTH-7096 — Comparative Ch’olan
ANTH-7400 — Language & Culture: Language is created by people and is constantly changing as the people who speak it change and adapt to new ways of being. Culture likewise is a creation of the interaction of people. Language indexes the values, beliefs, practices, power relationships and social identities of its speakers. This course will examine these facets of language use across a variety of cultures.
COMM-3140 — Cross-Cultural Analysis: A critical examination of communication in intercultural, interethnic and international contexts. An overview of models and approaches designed to explain cultural differences in communication with emphasis on the dimensions of symbolization, acculturation, prejudice, stereotyping and ideology. Conceptual frameworks are applied and tested within a range of cultural populations as defined by race, ethnicity, gender, physical disability, sexuality, socio-economic class and geographic location.
COMM-4553 — Brazilian TV & Culture: This course analyzes the dynamic interactions between television, culture and power in Brazil. It emphasizes the role of television as one of the central institutions that mediate the constitution of hegemonic values and meanings in Brazilian society, with an emphasis on the dominant media company (TV Globo) and on the most popular TV genre (telenovelas).
COMM-4180 — Women’s Media Cultures: Commercial media that explicitly targets women as audiences have long been major economic drivers of global media industries, yet these same genres are often panned by critics. Women's labor is also essential to media industries, yet it is often rendered invisible and/or women are subjected to gendered forms of harassment and exploitation. Taking a global and intersectional approach, this course examines how gender shapes reception, distribution, and production in media industries around the world. It explores how people-centered methods can shed light on women’s media cultures and trains students in designing and carrying out their own ethnographic research projects.
COMM-4811 — Social Movements on Screen: From the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, to the feminist movement for the Equal Rights Amendment, to the UK miners in 1972, this class will analyze how these and many other social movements have been represented on screen in film and media. The class will help students form critiques about the narration choices of filmmakers and analyze these choices against the backdrop of historical analysis of these social movements.
DANC-1920 — Brazilian Dance: Introduction to Brazilian dance, focusing especially on samba, the overview of history and cultural context. Course may be repeated 2 times for credit. (2 credit hours).
DANC-3240 — US/Caribe Social Dance: This course will study, compare selected social and vernacular dances from early American vernacular jazz dance and selected Afro-Caribbean dance idioms: Coursework includes assigned reading, lecture, research, videotape viewing and studio dancing.
EBIO-2110 — Tropical Biology: Introduction to ecological, evolutionary, and organismal studies of living organisms in the neotropics.
EBIO-3020 — Community Engaged Conservation: This 3 credit course builds student capacity to conceptualize, design and articulate community engaged research projects. Along with research design, the course trains students to think and communicate across disciplines via readings, assignments and workshops. Over the course of the semester, students will develop research questions and methodological approaches to produce an ethical, independent research proposal to investigate a problem or question related to rainforest conservation. In addition, students will learn to provide feedback and constructive criticism to the work of their peers and engage with critical perspectives on issues that arise in community engaged conservation. The expectation is that students will go on to implement the research projects that they develop in the context of this course. This course fulfills the Newcomb-Tulane College intensive writing requirement and provides an optional service-learning component.
ECON-4660 — Seminar on Latin American Countries: A complement to other courses in the Latin American economics sequence focusing on a particular country or sub-region. ECON 6660 is the master's-level equivalent.
ECON-6660 — Seminar on Latin American Countries: A complement to other courses in the Latin American economics sequence focusing on a particular country or sub-region. ECON 6660 is the master's-level equivalent.
ENLS-7100 — Pro Modern and Contemporary Literature, Borderlands: Proseminar in Modern and Contemporary Literature.
HISB-4250 — Slave Ships and Capitalism: This course will explore the history of the Atlantic slave trade that brought captive Africans as exploitable laborers to North, South, Central America and the Caribbean between the 1500s and the 1800s. This human traffic has long been recognized as foundational for the economic growth of the Americas and Europe, and the making of the modern world. It has also been recognized for its extreme inhumanity, its global reach and its complex effects on the African continent. Course also covers inter-regional slave trafficking within the United States and around Latin America and the Caribbean. The course also addresses this forced migration as a unique process of cultural interaction and cultural change. Sometimes the course will focus more narrowly on specific themes such as the role of gender in shaping Atlantic slave trade history, or the formal and customary and laws and regulations which permitted, regulated and later prohibited this form of human trafficking.
HISE-2410 — Spain, 1369-1716: Surveys the course of Spanish history from the completion of the medieval Reconquest and the rise of the Trastamara dynasty in the fourteenth century until the end of Habsburg Spain in the early eighteenth century, with particular attention to state formation and the role of Spain as a great European power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Besides politics, the course examines central topics in the social, religious and cultural history of late medieval and early modern Spain.
HISL-2822 — Latin American Environmental History: Latin America is famous for world-class biodiversity and mega-scale extractive enterprises. How did we get here and where are we going?
HISL-2910 — Caribbean Rebellion & Revolution: This course will explore a handful of major Antillean rebellions and revolutions from the Haitian Revolution in 1791 to the Grenada Revolution in 1979.
HISL-2911 — Dictators & their Demise: Why do dictators rise—and why do they fall? This course explores these larger questions through case studies of twentieth-century Latin American dictatorships, from the populistic- nationalists of the 1930s to the military regimes in the 1960s and 1970s and beyond. We’ll look at how authoritarian leaders built power, gained popular support, and justified repression in the name of order and security. We will examine the social and economic conditions that sustained dictatorship, the role of foreign powers (especially the U.S.), and how citizens came to resist these “regimes of exception.” By the end of the course, students will better understand both the endurance and fragility of authoritarian rule—and its echoes in today’s world.
HISL-7840 — Historiography of Modern Latin America: This course traces major trends in scholarship on modern Latin American history.
HISU-2640 — US Foreign Relations since WWII: Foreign relations is front page news every day: the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the threat of terrorism and nuclear proliferation, rising food and oil prices, global warming, debates over human rights practices, and even the Olympics. Although each of these topics has strong contemporary resonance, the United States role in the world has a long and complex history. In this course, we will study US foreign relations from the end of World War II through the present. The course will define US foreign relations broadly and include diplomatic policy makers, military interventions, economic policy, and non-state actors engaged in international relations. Students will learn to analyze opposing historical interpretations, evaluate primary sources, ask analytic questions, and develop arguments.
HISU-6630 — US Labor and Migration: This course is an advanced seminar on the relationships between labor, capital, and migrant populations to (and within) the United States in the twentieth century. Globalization and migration are not new phenomenon. This course will begin in the late nineteenth century and explore the role of labor, industrial capitalism, and markets in the early twentieth century. It will challenge students to recognize the antecedents to today's immigration debates and consider continuities as well as changes in the US economy.
ISIB-6010 — Approaches to Global Dilemmas: Utilizing approaches to learning that are theoretical, empirical, and interdisciplinary, this course will assess contemporary global dilemmas in a variety of developing and developed world regions and the corresponding role of the states in combating political, ecological, economic insecurity. The course is taught by faculty in various social sciences and humanities disciplines.
LAST-1010 — Intro. to Latin American Studies: This course provides a basic historical, cultural, and socio-political introduction to the study of Latin America, including the Latinx influence on US culture and society. The class seeks to find cultural and historic continuity within this vastly diverse region relative to a complex history of exchange and interchange with the US and Europe. Students discuss the influence of foreign perceptions on our understanding of Latin America and Latinx America and survey how Latin American and Latinx artists, writers and intellectuals represent their nations and cultures to themselves and to the world. The class equips students for more advanced coursework on the region in a wide array of disciplines at Tulane. Focusing on the development of cultural understanding and intercultural communication and creating the foundations for area expertise, the class provides critical skills for numerous professions in an increasingly globalized society and economy including business, social policy, public health, law and advocacy, among others.
LAST-1890 — Service Learning: LAST 1010: Service learning component for LAST 1010. Course counts towards the NTC Public Service requirement. For information on the service-learning project for this class: https://cps.tulane.edu/academics/service-learning-course.
LAST-3000 — Native Flora & Fauna: Since colonization, the traditional plants, animals, and products of various Indigenous cultures have become global commodities. Through multiple disciplinary perspectives, this course examines Indigenous traditions and Western commodification of a variety of South American plants, animals, and products from the pre-Columbian period to the present.
LAST-3010 — Approaches Latinx: This course introduces students to the study of the Latinx diaspora and Latinx experience in the United States as a step toward a more holistic understanding of the region we call Latin America. Latin America and the US have long shared porous borders that blur easy division between histories and identities. This class looks at the United States’ historical relationship with Latin America to explore push and pull factors of Latinx immigration, regimes of migration and citizenship, borders and border cultures and emergent forms of political and social action. It introduces students to key theories on Latinx politics, culture and identity, introducing canonical texts in the field. Students will become familiar with interdisciplinary approaches and discipline-based theories of identity, assimilation, transnationalism, and citizenship, and other issues that contribute to the field of Latinx studies. Notes: For optional 20 hour service learning component, register in LAST3890-01.
LAST-3890 — Service Learning: LAST 3010: Optional 20 hour service learning component for LAST 3010-01. Course counts towards the NTC Public Service requirement. For more information on the service-learning project for this class, visit https://cps.tulane.edu/academics/service-learning-course.
LAST-4560 — Internship Studies: An experiential learning process coupled with pertinent academic course work. Open only to juniors and seniors in good standing. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.
LAST-4910 — Independent Study
LAST-4960 — Model OAS
LAST-6910 — Independent Study
LAST-6950 — Democratic Erosion in Latin America: Why do democracies erode and autocracies take hold? How do citizens, institutions, and international actors respond? This course explores these questions comparatively from theory to practice, to history and firsthand accounts, taking this topic of democratic erosion beyond the abstract to a reality shaping societies, families, and futures.
LAST-7720 — Pedagogy & Profession: This doctoral-level, discussion-based seminar provides doctoral students with the knowledge to think critically about their teaching practices and to enhance their pedagogical skills. By reading scholarship on teaching and learning, discussing challenges and controversies within the profession and field, creating and presenting a class lecture, and composing a syllabus and preparing a canvas site, students will engage both the theoretical and practical vectors of teaching Latin American Studies, while beginning to build a teaching portfolio and develop expertise to take into the job market. The course will help novice instructors to gain teaching-self-efficacy and utilize pedagogical best practices while providing a supportive environment to develop and discuss diverse instructional approaches and materials.
LAST-8990 — Master’s Thesis/Project
LAST-9980 — Master’s Research
LAST-9990— Dissertation Research
MUSC-1080 — Music of the Mexico-US Border: The Mexico-U.S. border has historically been a site of contention. Walls and policing try to keep the two sides separate and to make the U.S. impenetrable. But sound has different boundaries and is hard to contain. Moreover, for large groups of people, the border is a way of life where the categories “Mexican” and “American” have fluid meaning. This course examines musical recordings and performances from a transnational perspective, pointing at the limits of the nation-state and of the category of “Hispanic” to understand and embrace border populations and their musics.
MUSC-2016 — Music and Climate Change: This course explores the relation between music, sound and climate change. We do an overview of the field of acoustic ecology and explore key terms such as ambient music, soundscape, keytones and soundwalks, environmental sound art, among others. We look at issues of sound pollution and the sonic relations between humans and non-humans across different cultures, especially environmental racisms and the relation between climate change, music and the colonial. We explore these issues through specific audiovisual and sonic materials.
MUSC-3360 — The Latin Tinge: This course explores the relationship of African-American popular music and Latin American popular music, with a special focus on how New Orleans is a key site mediating these musical mixtures. It compares U.S. popular styles with styles from other countries in the hemisphere.
POLC-4010 — Politics of Atrocity Response: For majors only. Non-major juniors and seniors may enroll in courses at the 4000-level or above only with the consent of the instructor. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours under separate topic.
POLC-6350 — Social, Protest, Policy Change: We think of social movements as forces for change, which frequently involves policy and institutional reform. Yet just how they affect such change is frequently not explicitly addressed. This course introduces students to major theories and analytical frameworks that help to explain the policy/political consequences of contentious action by social movements, ranging from nil to substantial and points in between. In the process, the course covers themes such as race and ethnicity, policy consequences of resistance to mega development projects, environmental justice, nuclear power and peace movements, among others. Effects are traced at various levels of governance, from national to local (sorry no international). Regions of the world include Latin America, the United States, and Europe.
POLI-4600 — Latin American International Relations: This course deals with relations among Latin American nations as well as those with the United States, Europe, Japan, and multinational institutions. This class will cover the international aspects of issues such as trade, security, human rights, immigration, and environmental politics as they relate to Latin America.
POLI-4620 — Global Environmental Politics: An examination of the political dimensions of international environmental problems. The course will include investigation and analysis of the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to a range of environmental problems.
PORT-3130 — Intro to Brazilian Culture: Introduction to Brazilian literature, with a focus on questions of cultural identities, relations between high and low culture, representations of race, gender, class, and sexuality.
PORT-6910 — Luso-Brazilian Cities: Salvador de la Bahia: Open to graduate students only.
SOCI-2600 — Environmental Sociology: This course examines political and economic aspects of global and local environmental problems. Topics include how societies and the environment interact, why some environmental risks have gained most attention, how support for environmental concerns can be measured, responses by environmental social movements, and visions of sustainable societies in the First and Third Worlds.
SPAN-3130 — Intro. to Latin American Cultures: Introduction to the cultural diversity of Latin America through the study of contemporary literary, social, political, and popular culture trends as observed by selected literary figures, intellectuals, and artists.
SPAN-3280 — Spanish and Latin American Literature & Film: Through a series of film viewings, readings, and access to other visual media from Latin America and Spain, students receive instruction in how to discuss and analyze visual culture in Spanish. Vocabulary building and strategies for enhanced viewing and reading comprehension are stressed. Significant emphasis on the continued development of linguistic skills.
SPAN-3890 — Service Learning: SPAN 3040: Optional 20-hour service learning component for SPAN 3040. For more information on the service-learning project for this class, visit https://cps.tulane.edu/academics/service-learning-course.
SPAN-4060 — Hispanic Literary Foundations: An introduction to the literature and critical issues of early Hispanic cultures until modernismo. Students acquire fundamental skills in literary and critical analysis as well as a basic understanding of key cultural topics such as medieval "convivencia," the social order in early modern Spain indigenous concerns in colonial Latin America, and the formation of national literatures in 19th century Latin America. Prerequisite(s): (SPAN 3040, 3050, 3060, or 3080) and (SPAN 3130, 3240 or 3350) and (SPAN 3270 or 3280) or minimum score of PASS in 'SPAN 4000 level Placement'.
SPAN-4110 — Modern Spanish American Literature: Major authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Martí, Darío, Vallejo, Alfonso Reyes, Borges, Rulfo, Paz, and Carpentier.
SPAN-4180 — The Politics of Bad Bunny: Introduction to multiple aspects of Latin American culture. Students study a variety of cultural production, ranging from literature, film, music, and art, to its cooking and comics to form as complete as possible a vision of Latin American’s complex and multifaceted culture. Students examine mainstream notions of national identity, while at the same time interrogating them by considering questions of gender, race, class, sexuality, and region.
SPAN-4270 — Iberoamerican Dialectology: Survey of the varieties of Spanish spoken in Spain, Latin America, and the United States. We look at variation in pronunciation and grammatical usage, such as the tú/usted/vos, as well as variation by age, gender, and social class.
SPAN-4710 — Environmental Literature: The importance and grandeur of the diverse environments of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds as well as the problems and challenges posed by foreign and local exploitation of natural resources, environmental racism, climate change and environmental degradation.
SPAN-6160 — Sound Studies in Latin America: This course is an introduction to sound studies and sound art in LatinAmerica. Speaking, reading and writing knowledge of Spanish (the class is in Spanish). Spanish majors must have completed or be concurrently completing the 4000-level sequence.
SPAN-6780 — Latin American Cultural Studies: The course is an intensive survey of Latin American cultural studies. Topics to be studied include: interactions among popular, erudite, and mass cultures; debates on modernity and postmodernity; relations between alphabetic and non-alphabetic writing systems in colonial and post-colonial contexts; emergence and development of Latin American concepts such as mestizaje, hybridity, transculturation, heterogeneity; relations between culture and the state; issues of class, race, and gender in the study of Latin American culture. Theorists to be studies include Néstor García Canclini, José Martín Barbero, Beatriz Sarlo, Nelly Richard, Roberto Schwarz, Silviano Santiago.
SPAN-6850 — Central American Literature: This course is a capstone seminar on major authors of the Hispanic literary tradition from both Spain and Latin America. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.
SPAN-7920 — Caribbean Imaginaries
