FALL 2025
Contemporary Black Literatures
BLS 3002 ETRA, Tuesday & Thursday 2:30PM-3:45PM
Dr. Rojo Robles
Prof. Robles How do Black writers reimagine identity, belonging, and resistance in the 21st century? This course is dedicated to exploring Black literature in global contexts, engaging poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and hybrid texts that illuminate the cultural flows and political struggles shaping contemporary Black diasporic life. We will examine Afro-Latinx, Caribbean, and Black Atlantic poetics, Black Caribbean soundscapes, speculative Black futures, and Afrofuturism to see how language, music, and storytelling push against colonial legacies and envision liberated worlds.
Focusing on experimental narratives and radical Black aesthetics, we will study how form becomes an act of defiance in graphic narratives, performances, and testimonios. We’ll also explore the city as an archive, reading about Black diasporic urban dwellers as architects of memory and artistic innovation. This course invites students to analyze, create, and challenge narratives as we explore the possibilities of Black global literatures.
Black Economic Development
BLS 3015 UWA, Thursdays 6:05pm – 9:00pm
Dr. Arthur Lewin
This course is not only about the fortune of the African American community in the 175 years since the Civil War, it’s also about the nuts and bolts of accumulating, maintaining and growing wealth that the African American community, and every community, needs to know. Race has always been a central issue in the Economic History of the nation, and class has too. The strategies, and the challenges, Black Americans have faced, and are actively dealing with, offer invaluable lessons that all can benefit from.
Women of Color
BLS 3024 EMWA, Monday & Wednesday 2:30pm – 3:45pm
Dr. Keisha Allan
This course examines the themes of identity, gender, race, colonialism, and resistance in the works of women writers of color. We will examine the ways in which women use writing as an avenue to escape, protest against and interrogate social and patriarchal repression. The texts of women writers of color analyze the marginalization and vulnerability of women caught up in the extreme violence meted out by postcolonial dictators such as Trujillo (Dominican Republic) and Duvalier (Haiti) or the histories of slavery and conquest in the Americas. This course examines how the voices and sensibility of women writers of color contribute to our understanding of the experiences of women at home and in the diaspora.
Critical Race Theory, Literary Studies, and Culture
BLS 3085/ ENG 3832, Tuesday & Thursday 4:10 pm -5:25 pm
Dr. Shelly Eversley
Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an academic framework that examines how race and racism are embedded in legal and social structures. It argues that racism is not merely an individual prejudice, but that it is a systemic concern. This course will investigate how power, language, history, and representation inform constructions of race and racial hierarchies including thinking about intersectional fields such as in gender and sexuality, postcolonial studies, and Black studies. Our work together will consider ways that the central ideas of CRT illuminate and inform literature, film, music, archival material, and contemporary cultural production. Everyone is welcome.
Puerto Rican Culture
LTS 3007 UWA, Wednesday 6:05 pm – 9:00 pm (Online synchronous)
Dr. Gustavo Quintero Vera
This interdisciplinary course will examine the life of Puerto Ricans in the island, as well as that of the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York and beyond. It explores the ever-changing history, culture, and beliefs of its people through poetry, novels, historical and critical essays, documentaries, videos, songs and podcasts. Some of the topics covered will be the nature of US-PR relations and its effect on the production of subjectivities, the current exploitation of the of the archipelago and its people through disaster capitalism and the multi-faceted resistances to these forces, and the analysis of popular and traditional culture through artistic expressions. This course intends to offer different entry points into a complex and contradictory culture that consistently challenges structures of local and imperial power through a critique of colonialism and its effects on identity formations and national discourses.
Afrolatinidades
BLS/LTS 3019 FTRA, Tuesday & Thursday 4:10 pm-5:25pm
Dr. Rojo Robles
How do Black Latinx communities shape contemporary culture, challenge racial binaries, and redefine identity across borders? This student-centered course explores the complex realities of African-descended populations in Latin America and Afro-Latinxs in the United States. Through a mix of cutting-edge scholarship, powerful memoirs, bold poetry, gripping short stories, and striking films and documentaries, we will examine how Afro-Latinx cultures engage with history, music, gender, social activism, and media representation.
From colonial resistance to today’s anti-racist movements, we’ll unpack pressing questions of Black identity, transnationalism, and diaspora. This course brings Afro-Latinx experiences to the forefront, offering new ways to think about cultural belonging, artistic expression, and political struggle. Whether you’re interested in hip-hop and reggaetón, Black feminist thought, decolonial movements, or the power of Black storytelling, this course provides a space for critical dialogue and creative exploration.
The U.S. & Mexico Border
LTS/SOC/ANT 3021 CMWA, Monday & Wednesday 10:45AM – 12:00PM
Dr. Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana
This course interrogates the origins and continuity of U.S.-Mexico border-making processes and the socio-political phenomena involved in the border’s production and re-production. In this course, the U.S.-Mexico border is a place of identity formation, cultural expression, revision, life, and death. This course offers a paradigm of the border as both a space for the production of violence (the border as violence) and the production of surveillance mechanisms, illegalization practices, and resilience. We will study how violence is produced at the border through war and neoliberalism and how border communities and migrants challenge violence through arts, culture, and social movements.
As we will see, the border has a complex history and presence. It is a dynamic place where historical imaginaries and power relations are not only affirmed but also resisted. It is a place of hemispheric and global extensions, movements, crossings, and contact zones.
We start from the premise that the U.S. and Mexico have had a fluid relationship throughout time and space. We will begin by discussing the epistemologies or critical frameworks concerning the border. Then, we will focus on the social and ideological development of the border region, transnational relations, and policies. We will then center the cultural works and narratives about the border produced by Chicana/o/x/Latina/o/x/e storytellers who theorize about the U.S.- Mexico border represented in various genres (digital storytelling, memoir, poetry, art, film, etc.). Their theoretical and narrative contributions offer an assessment of the border that considers the colonial, racial, hetero-patriarchal, and nation-making projects underway through border-making processes.
Students will have opportunities to propose a community-engaged project centered around key issues explored in the course.
Latino/a Literature In the U.S
LTS 3059 DMWA, Monday & Wednesday 12:50PM – 2:05PM
Dr. Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana
This course explores the creative process of writing about archives to explore the Mexican-American diaspora in the US. Throughout the semester, students will examine various genres including novels, short stories, poetry, memoirs, and essays penned by Mexican-American/Chicanx-origin writers and authors covering migration-related topics. By exploring themes such as migration, identity, assimilation, cultural heritage, and social justice, students will gain insight into the complexities of the Mexican-American experience and its intersections with broader issues of race, ethnicity, class, and gender in the United States.
Students will have opportunities to produce creative works to demonstrate their understanding of key concepts explored in the course.
LTS 3012 FMWA , Monday & Wednesday 4:10PM – 5:25PM
Latinas: Soc & Cult Survey
Dr. Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana
This course addresses Latinas’ social and economic conditions in the United States. We will discuss questions of gender and sexuality, language, politics, labor relations, family relationships, literary and artistic expression, and the construction of identities as they manifest themselves in the experiences of contemporary Mexican American/Chicana women.
Drawing on an interdisciplinary survey of Mexican American/Chicana representation in the 20th and 21st centuries, we will study the struggles of intersectional feminisms of color, movement organizing, and social justice. We will explore how Mexican American/Chicanas, including those of Mexican, Central American, South American, and Caribbean origins, currently living in the U.S. that were either born here or migrated from another country, create knowledge through the art of testimonios (a life-history narrative). Students will have opportunities to produce creative works to analyze the complex politics of race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and other categories of power in the lives of women of color in the United States.
Seminar Black and Latino Studies
BLS /LTS 4900 CMWB, Monday & Wednesday 10:45am – 12:00pm
Dr. Keisha Allan
In this course, we will consider approaches to various social and political movements and the role those movements have played in engendering social justice. We will focus on various movements that have transformed the social and political landscape in Latin America and the Caribbean, including movements organized around gender issues, human rights, environmental protection, and indigenous rights. We will also consider various ideologies that inspire ideals of justice, freedom and equality. By the end of the course, you will deepen your knowledge of activism, resistance and protest in Latin America and the Caribbean by exploring how these movements become the impetus for social and political transformation.
Latin America and the Caribbean
BLS/ LTS/ LACS 4901 CMWA, Monday & Wednesday 4:10 pm –5:25 pm
Dr. Tshombe MIles Miles
Explore the rich tapestry of Latin America and the Caribbean in this interdisciplinary course. Delve into the histories of indigenous and Afro-diasporic communities, examining the enduring impacts of colonialism and slavery. Engage with transformative social movements advocating for feminism, workers’ rights, human rights, environmental justice, and LGBTQIA+ issues. Analyze the region’s political and economic systems, governmental structures, migration patterns, and foreign relations. Through diverse social science perspectives, you’ll develop research projects tailored to your interests. Please note: Credit is granted for only one of the following courses—BLS, LACS, or LTS 4901—as they are interchangeable under the F-replacement policy.
Latin America and the Caribbean
BLS/ LTS/ LACS 4902 FTRA, Tuesday & Thursday 4:10pm-5:25pm
Prof. Joseph Caceres
Employing sociological, historical, philosophical, literary and aesthetic frameworks, this course will explore how artists and thinkers of African, Caribbean, and Latinx descent use language as a tool for political, social, and cultural expression in the Americas. One overarching theme many of the works in this course address is the undoing and unlearning of a Western (or Eurocentric and/or Anglo-American focused) education that erases, silences, and marginalizes non-white and/or non-Western bodies of knowledges, cultures, and histories. Thus, in studying the work of artists and thinkers of African, Caribbean, and Latinx descent we will not only expose, challenge, and expand our thinking beyond the traditional Western ways History has been taught, we will also be recovering the histories, people, and legacies disremembered by that History. We will do this through research projects centered around personal experiences to build a diverse network of knowledges that should metaphorically resemble constellations or points on a map, to counter the singular, stagnant, narrow, and violent Western perspective.
Latin America and the Caribbean
BLS/ LTS/ LACS 4902 ETRA, Tuesday & Thursday 5:50 pm – 7:05 pm
Dr. Rebecca Salois
This section of BLS/LTS/LACS 4902 will prioritize theater and performance in an asynchronous format. Students will engage with theater texts, view performances, and demonstrate analytical skills through research and investigation. They will explore social, political, and cultural histories throughout Latin America through the lens of performance. The class will focus on both the elements of theater (props, costumes, staging, etc.) and the analysis of themes in theater scripts.