Professor: Sidney Chalhoub. Slavery and emancipation were major issues in nineteenth-century Brazilian history. In the 1870’s and 1880’s, with the drama of emancipation unfolding, yellow fever meant death to European immigrants and a major obstacle to achieving a social configuration that valued the whitening ideal and excluded people of African descent from social and economic opportunities. Although the primary focus of this course is Brazil, students may opt to write a final paper that compares an aspect of the social history of slavery and/or race and/or disease in...

Professor: Sidney Chalhoub. The objective of this course is to study major authors and works of nineteenth-century Brazilian fiction. Writing fiction from a spot deemed to be in the “periphery” of the western world meant a difficult and complex engagement with European literary and intellectual traditions. The course will focus primarily on the evidence regarding changes in the politics of social dominance in the period –from slavery and paternalism to the worlds and meanings of “free” labor. Questions of class, gender and race in the general context of defining and...

Professor: Alejandro de la Fuente. This seminar surveys the booming historiographies of slavery and the law in Latin America, the United States, and Africa. Earlier generations of scholars relied heavily on European legal traditions to draw sharp contrasts between U.S. and Latin American slavery. The most recent scholarship, however, approaches the legal history of slavery through slaves' legal initiatives and actions. These initiatives were probably informed by the Africans' legal cultures, as many of them came from societies where slavery was practiced. Our seminar puts...

Professor: Alejandro de la Fuente. This course focuses on the history of "race" as a category of difference and explores why "race" has become a globally-accepted idiom to classify humans. It assesses the prominent roles that science and scientists have played in the process of naturalizing "race" and analyzes how "scientific" theories of race were developed and disseminated globally in the modern period. We trace the formation of these ideas in the North Atlantic, their diffusion to various areas of the world, and the manner in which cultural and political elites adopted...

Professor: Alejandro de la Fuente. This course explores how African cultural expressions influenced colonial societies and later national cultures in Latin America. How did peoples of African descent shape the formation of Latin American national cultures in areas such as literature, religion, visual arts, music, dance, and cinema? Some scholars have debated whether African religious, musical, medical and communitarian practices were reproduced in the New World or whether they were creolized through fusion with other (European and indigenous) practices. Others have sought...

Professor: Kirsten Weld. In this seminar, participants will use archival resources available at Harvard to carry out original research on a topic of their choice related to the seminar theme of history and memory in Latin America. Early sessions will be devoted to a series of foundational readings; later sessions will be spent workshopping and presenting research-in-progress.

Professor: Kirsten Weld. This course surveys Latin America from its 19th-century independence movements through the present day. How did the powerful legacies of European colonialism, and the neocolonial economic order that emerged to replace it, shape the Americas' new nations? Themes include nationalism and identity, revolution and counterrevolution, populism, state formation, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, social movements, the role of foreign powers, inequality and social class, dictatorship, democratization, and human rights.

Professor: Kirsten Weld. This course explores the history of Mexico in the 19th and 20th centuries, emphasizing the importance of historical approaches to understanding critical phenomena in contemporary Mexican affairs. Topics covered include colonial legacies, race and ethnicity, the Mexican Revolution, the border, nation-building and development, Mexico-US relations, popular culture, economic crisis, the Zapatista rebellion, narco-violence and the "war on drugs," and migration.