The Environmental History of Latin America

This course offers students an introduction to environmental history from perspectives that center the societies and ecologies of Latin America and the Caribbean. Thinking across different chronologies and spaces, we will draw from a range of historical and interdisciplinary scholarship, as well as primary sources, to examine changing relationships between Latin American environments and their attendant social, cultural, political, urban, agrarian, maritime, legal and economic histories. Our collective explorations on these topics will adopt various scales of analysis, from local and regional to continental, and will push us to approach key themes of Precolonial, Colonial, and Modern Latin American historiography from an environmental lens, including: Indigenous histories; colonialism, extractivism, and slavery; Afro-Latinx histories; capitalism and dependency theory; the politics of modern conservation.