Teaching

This interdisciplinary course examines the transitional justice process in the Southern Cone of Latin America, with a focus on human rights debates, truth commissions, domestic and transnational trials, the transformations in the scenario of the law, as well as the struggle for justice and the decolonization of the Western models of transitional justice. We read and analyze testimonial narratives, art, film, and critical readings from different disciplines. We also discuss the struggle over memory and democracy, underscoring the role that the arts have played in rethinking memory and justice. In this course, we place particular emphasis on cultural debates about memory and witnessing, trauma (and transgenerational trauma), truth, representation, accountability, and the role of artistic practices in the affirmation of human rights.

Through a varied corpus of Latin American and Latinx films, and drawing on critical approaches from film studies, philosophy, history, literary studies, and narrative medicine, we examine different aspects of the narration of illness, pain, trauma, and healing. We take as a point of departure several definitions of the medical humanities (including those articulated from a critical perspective) to explore how stories of health and illness are conceived in Latin American and Latinx audiovisual works. In this course, we analyze, on the one hand, the visual and acoustic elements that narrative films use to recount a life story—especially when the experience of illness or trauma interrupts and transforms it—and, on the other hand, the points of convergence and divergence that unfold in the act of listening, where different cultural and interpretive frameworks come into play. 

This interdisciplinary course serves as an introduction to environmental and health humanities, delving into the intersections between these two fields of study. Our readings will primarily focus on how the humanities and the arts engage in discussions of the impact that environmental issues and the ecological crisis have on health, illness, and sanitary crisis. Through a collection of Latin American short stories, essays and films, we will explore the intricate connections between the human and the non-human, the impacts of environmental changes on individual and community health and well-being, and the exacerbation of social inequalities and violations of human and environmental rights in Latin America. Additionally, we will emphasize the struggles for resistance and transformation, acknowledging the interconnectedness of all forms of life. With a particular emphasis on the interplay between health and social and environmental justice, we will investigate how literature, documentary film, and art can contribute to these discussions and what we can learn from Latin American thinkers, writers, artists, and social activists. We will explore essential concepts and debates and analyze portrayals of illness, toxicity, degradation, extractivism, as well as various expressions of healing, communities of care, and the struggles and initiatives to interconnect medical and environmental humanities. We will also explore the role that literature, art, and film currently play (or potentially play) in the education of health professionals.

The purpose of this course is to examine diverse ways of conceptualizing, understanding, and defining gender-based violence in Latin America over the past four decades. The course begins with theoretical approaches and feminist debates. It then analyzes the impact of international norms and jurisprudence on domestic discussions and transformations in legal and judicial frameworks, with particular attention to decisions issued by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Building on this theoretical foundation, which traces the definitions and redefinitions of gender-based violence, the course analyzes a corpus of narrative and documentary films, artistic practices, essays, testimonial literature, and media interventions addressing gender-based violence and femicide.

 The course is organized into three sections: 1) debates on femicide and feminicide; 2) the trafficking of girls and women for purposes of sexual exploitation; and 3) gender-based violence within the context of authoritarian regimes.

In each of these sections, we examine theoretical, legal, literary, artistic, and feminist movement perspectives..

This course investigates some of the major contributions of women filmmakers to Latin American cinema—contributions that have long been marginalized within film industries as well as in scholarly approaches to the field. The recent surge in women’s filmmaking across the region at the beginning of the millennium has prompted a reassessment of their presence in a domain historically regarded as exclusively masculine and heteronormative, as well as of the challenges posed by their diverse audiovisual practices. The heterogeneity of women’s cinema in Latin America invites a rethinking of the aesthetic-political frameworks and the visual and sound theories necessary for analyzing the scope of their contributions—not only to the study of gender and sexuality but also to intersectional perspectives on racialization, coloniality, and state authoritarianism. Working with a diverse corpus of films, spanning silent cinema to contemporary productions and encompassing multiple moments in Latin American history, the course examines women-directed cinema through various feminist lenses, exploring the tensions, conflicts, struggles, and forms of marginalization that these works articulate. 

 This course offers an introduction to Latin American cinema through some of its most representative films, schools, directors, and movements. It examines the history of film in the region by analyzing national cinemas and their continental and transnational projections across different periods—from silent cinema and classical filmmaking to the multiple waves of New Latin American Cinema, including the movements of the 1960s, the films that accompanied democratization processes in the 1980s, and the aesthetic innovations of the mid-1990s and early twenty-first century. The corpus includes documentary, narrative, and poetic or experimental productions. In doing so, the course provides a historical study of Latin American cinema from its origins to the present. 

Through a corpus of films from Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, Uruguay, Peru, and Chile, this course examines diverse audiovisual approaches to memory—whether intimate, familial, collective, or public. The course places particular emphasis on aesthetic and theoretical perspectives on the visual and the sonic, and on the ways in which these elements register both memory and oblivion. It also analyzes the ruptures and unexpected irruptions of images and sounds that either narrate more marginal memories or reveal the affects, sensations, and emotions that surface in the attempt to reconstruct a history and to shape individual, collective, national, and transnational narratives. By examining visual and sonic strategies of remembrance, the course explores how various audiovisual forms—documentary, narrative, and experimental—evoke, reconstruct, and invent what must not, or cannot, be forgotten. 

In this course, which serves as the culminating experience of the program, students devote the semester to developing a research project that is submitted as a final written paper. 

En este curso estudiamos la literatura, el arte y la cultura del siglo XIX en América Latina y su relación con los proyectos e identidades nacionales y sus tensiones,  conflictos, y exclusiones. Consideraremos los procesos de fundación escrituraria de los estados nacionales y los procesos de adopción de los modelos liberales fundacionales, a través de la influencia del pensamiento de la Ilustración, el positivismo, el énfasis en el progreso y en la modernización de las naciones en estrecha relación con del análisis de las relaciones entre el pensamiento político y las estéticas románticas, realistas y naturalistas, en particular en relación a sus formas de pensar los cuerpos y sus patologías, las fronteras y los proyectos migratorios, el entorno,  el extractivismo y el pensamiento colonial de las naciones independientes desde sus inicios, pasando por sus guerras civiles y sus consolidaciones. 

En este curso discutiremos tanto el impacto de la globalización y del globalismo en la literatura, la cultura y la escena cultural de América Latina como los mercados y circuitos globales de traducción, los regímenes transoceánicos de movilidad y los imaginarios decoloniales y poscoloniales del Sur Global. Asimismo, nos centraremos en nuestra disciplina y en el marco institucional en el cual las humanidades latinoamericanas se han desarrollado desde los años sesenta hasta el presente. Un eje central de nuestras discusiones será la construcción del campo de estudio a lo largo de las últimas seis décadas: sus transformaciones, debates, recurrencias y urgencias. A través de un corpus que incluye testimonios, ensayos, novelas, cuentos, filmes, fotografías, así como proyectos artísticos y museográficos, abordaremos, por una parte, los flujos, redes y conexiones, y por otra, los anclajes espaciales y temporales. Tiempo y espacio se entrelazan con reflexiones sobre corporalidad, memoria, historia, migración, violencia, salud, trauma, insumisiones y formas de coexistencia, a partir de nuevas estéticas y de un énfasis en la ampliación de los archivos y sus proyecciones documentales, artísticas y movimientistas.

La década del ochenta puede ser considerada la década de la explosión de escritura de mujeres en América Latina y podría decirse que ha transformado las formas de acercarse a la literatura misma, considerada por largos siglos como un dominio exclusivamente masculino. En este curso nos centraremos, por una parte, en la literatura escrita por mujeres para explorar el género, como centro una perspectiva que desafía los modos tradicionales de entender los sujetos históricos y políticos y la escritura misma. Al mismo tiempo, el boom, mas reciente, de cineastas mujeres en América Latina nos invita a revisar su rol de las poéticas audiovisuales. En este curso, se entenderá a la escritura de mujeres en un sentido amplio: no se tratarán sólo las prácticas escriturarias literarias sino que también se indagará en otras formas de escritura: la testimonial, la documental, la cinematográfica, la política, la experimental, la performática, la neovanguardista, la de los movimientos sociales y la de la vida cotidiana.