Welcome to Latin American and Caribbean History at Harvard!

Our program is vibrant and dynamic. Led by specialists who are deeply committed to cutting-edge research and pedagogy, we supervise and conduct scholarship that is temporally broad (covering the late pre-Columbian period through the present), geographically expansive (straddling the Americas from north to south, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and with particular attention to the region’s historical connections to Europe, Africa, and the United States), and thematically diverse (including legal, cultural, social, political, imperial, and economic history).

We believe that learning and teaching involve a collective effort based on close collaboration among faculty, students, and the larger communities of interest throughout the Americas and we strive to foster constant, ongoing conversations about pressing questions of historical and political inquiry. Our vision of history is inherently interdisciplinary, and is nourished by the methods and preoccupations of anthropology, law, political science, art history, economics, musicology, and beyond. We particularly welcome graduate students whose approach to scholarship engages the Americas in ways that are methodologically and thematically broad-minded and creative. We welcome inquiries from prospective applicants and encourage them to discuss their research interests with us.

Harvard is an ideal place to study Latin American and Caribbean history at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Our students benefit from the university’s unparalleled library and archival resources, the interdisciplinary David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and many other research centers and initiatives.

In addition to our regular workshop bringing together many Latin Americanist historians from our neighboring institutions throughout the greater Boston area, we maintain a lively program of lectures, colloquia, conferences, and seminars. We regularly have many visiting scholars and post doctoral fellows, and we co-sponsor events with other fields, disciplines, and universities.