Modern Latin America

This course is an introduction to the history of modern Latin America. Through lectures, discussions, shared readings, we will explore major themes in the past two hundred years of Latin American history, from the early nineteenth-century independence movements to the recent “Left Turn” in Latin American politics. Some of the topics we will examine include the racial politics of state-formation; the fraught history of U.S.-Latin American relations; the cultural politics of nationalism; how modernity was defined in relation to gender and sexuality; and the emergence of authoritarian regimes and revolutionary mobilizations, and the role of religion in shaping these processes.