Latin American and Caribbean Studies

The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) at New York University is an interdisciplinary teaching, research, and public information program. It is a Title VI National Resource Center (NRC), offering FLAS fellowship support for graduate students and support for faculty and graduate student research, colloquia, conferences, and outreach programs focusing on primary and secondary education in New York. Members of the center faculty have special expertise in history, cultural policy, performance, memory and heritage, narrative, indigenous peoples and social movements, gender, race, nationalism, migration, social justice and the study of urban life. The Center’s close working relationship with both the Program in Latino Studies and the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center provide further sources of transdisciplinary programming and expertise. The Center opens channels of communication and encourages the sharing of ideas and observations across disciplinary boundaries. CLACS has a special interest in Caribbean issues and in coordinating a comparative and relational transatlantic and hemispheric orientation toward Latin American and Caribbean issues of the past and present, and in promoting transtlantic approaches to the complex interplay of European, African, and Amerindian social and cultural backgrounds in the genesis of these regions’ hybrid postcolonial realities. Rather than simply providing a window through which North Americans may observe Latin America, the Caribbean, and their historical entanglements both across the Iberian Atlantic and throughout the Americas, the Center seeks to serve as a bridge between them. The Center offers a thorough graduate curriculum, centered on an intensive and interdisciplinary two-semester Introduction to Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Training is available in Portuguese as well as Spanish, and in the two most significant indigenous languages of Latin America: Quechua and Nahuatl.