Welcome to the New Academic Year!
Welcome to the New Academic Year!
Dear colleagues and students,
CLAS welcomes the new academic year, my second as director. This year we will continue to build on the work done by former director Ulla Berg and during my first year. Despite some financial restrictions for this coming year (we rely on winter session enrolments for a good part of our budget) we will continue to support our core and new programs:
- CLAS and the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies will host a start of year reception on Thursday September 22, 5-6:30PM. Please join us in Lucy Stone Hall (Livingston Campus)!!
- Last year we created six new Working Groups, this year one more is coming. Working groups now have assigned budgets, coordinators, and a clear mission.
- Standby for a major conference in September (22-23) on Mexican Indigenous History organized by Board of Governors Professor Camilla Townsend and co-sponsored by the CLAS and the History Department.
- The Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration blossomed this summer through the participation of colleagues from Yale, and will expand by bringing in support from other colleagues at Princeton and the University of Connecticut, and from corporate and Humanities foundations in Puerto Rico. I spent a good part of the summer developing this work and it promises to be a very rewarding experience for all involved. Rutgers History graduate student Rosa Cordero participated in the work. You can sign up for the email list that provides updates.
- Our incoming Post-Doctoral Fellow, Dr. Briana Nichols will be teaching our intro. course this fall and will organize a program on Central America for Spring semester. We are also hosting a visiting scholar, Ph.D. candidate in history, Jennifer Carcamo from UCLA.
- The CLAS continues to provide sections of our 101 Introduction to Latin America course. We also offer a few advanced courses of our own taught by instructors and our Postdoctoral Associate. We cross list all and any courses on Latin America, the Caribbean, and most courses in Latino Studies. Keep us posted on your courses.
- Faculty are also cooking up a program on the elections in Brazil while grad students are working on a collaborative history workshop with Princeton graduate students in history. And the Caribbean Working Group already has a meeting and other events planned. Stay tuned and join their email lists.
- We will hold an all-inclusive research conference in Spring where faculty and graduate students will present their work, including the many graduate students who received financial support from the Center in 2020, 2021 and 2022.
- The CLAS will hold its annual graduate student research grant competition.
- We will continue to support faculty-initiated programs including a series on prisons and incarceration in Latin American organized by Professors Berg and Leon and our continued collaboration with the Latino Studies Research Initiative.
- We will also continue sharing a biweekly email for external online events, so we don't overburden your inbox with single emails.
- Web page upgrades and inclusion will continue this year. Check out our events page and news page.
- The CLAS Executive Committee will continue to consider reforms to our various functions as well as finding external sources of support for the CLAS. Standby for the replacement election for the EC in the next two weeks.
- Maria Ealey has continued to administer our Center’s needs, despite the absence of one shared staff person since January. Our wonderful student assistants and student reps will help build our programs and channel suggestions.
- Send us your news, events, publications, and photos. We are committed to making faculty and student work on Latin America and the Caribbean visible.
Interested in getting more involved?
Organize a program, join or propose a Working Group, serve as file reader for the research grants, or in-class evaluation for our instructors, or run for our Board, help us identify new faculty and graduate students within your departments, programs or schools....Travelled South or did research this summer? Send us your pictures and a short description of your work!
Looking forward to all this!
Director
History of LAS at RU
Information will be posted shortly.
Alumni & Supporters
Friends and supporters of Latin American Studies can make a secure online donation at the Rutgers University Foundation website.
We can use your donation for:
1. Student academic achievement awards upon graduation. In the order of $50 to $200 based on GPA, thesis option, etc.
2. Student graduation stoles (purchased from indigenous artisans, inscribed with name and logo). In the order of $50-$500
3. Student emergency aid fund. Will vary based on availability and need.
4. Student tuition support award, ordinarily at least $1000.
Of course, donations of ANY size are welcome!! Please write to us with questions or to let us know you made a donation and with what purpose or intent.
In the drop down menu, please select “Other.” When another drop down menu appears, please type “Latin American Studies Program” in the box.
Please consider making a contribution to Center for Latin American Studies at Rutgers!
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You may also call the Rutgers University Foundation at 848-932-7777
Director's Message
The Center offers its own interdisciplinary undergraduate major and minor. We offer great flexibility in choosing courses about Latin America, the Caribbean and Diasporas in the humanities and social sciences. As a unit within the School or Arts and Sciences the courses for our major and minor intersect with many other majors and minors within SAS including Spanish/Portuguese, Anthropology, Sociology, Latino & Caribbean Studies, History, Political Science and Geography. Students from other schools including SEBS and SCI should contact me to explore how their coursework may count as elective credits in the Latin American Studies major and minor.
As Director, I provide individualized advising on course selection, fulfilling the language requirement, study abroad, and graduate school and career opportunities. As you can see from our course list, students have many options every semester and can carve out more focused regional or country-specific specialties. Our graduates have pursued many different trajectories informed by their coursework and training including public service, graduate school, public health, business and work with NGO's. We are committed to helping our students be successful in their goals.
Aldo Lauria Santiago, CLAS Director
2023-2024 Welcome Message
Apreciados colegas, estudiantes, profesores y amiga/os,
Welcome to the new academic year! We have lots of important announcements to make!
CLAS has a new assigned administrator, Nancy Rosario. Nancy had been helping us on an ad-hoc basis during the summer but more recently we hired her to serve multiple SAS Centers, including ours. She will now team with Martine Adams in managing the workload for all SAS Area Studies Centers. Welcome Nancy and thank you!
Our new program assistant this year is Hely Dodia and our assistants Alexander Gomez and Cheyenne Menezes, all Rutgers undergrads. Javier Gonzalez Cortes will continue as our media manager. We also have two work study students, Ailin and Crhisly. If you need help with any projects, let us know.
Our post-doctoral fellow, Briana Nichols, will enter her second year. We held a productive book manuscript review workshops last semester with , and she will be working on revisions this year. She will be teaching our intro 101 course this fall and a more advanced course on Mexican and Central American youth in the Spring. Also, I am glad to announce that SAS reapproved our Post-Doctoral position so we will be announcing soon the selection process for the 2024-2026 postdoctoral associate with a likely deadline in January. We are also working to promote applications by Latin Americanists to the extraordinary Presidential Post Doctoral Fellows program.
Geisa Rocha will continue to teach our 101 course both semesters and Gabriel Aleman will teach a spring term fully asynchronous section. Andres Gonzalez and Sandra Medina have continued covering our winter and summer session offerings. We are grateful for the work of these instructors and glad that the recent union negotiations improved their compensation.
This year visiting scholar and history graduate student Jennifer Carcamo (UCLA) will continue visiting. Elena Sabogal (Ph.D. Sociology) will also join us as independent scholar. Her work focuses on Peruvian immigration.
This summer we worked with the wonderful SAS Joomla Team to transition our website to the new SAS template, which is more elegant. Thanks to Laura and Eddie. We are still tweaking minor fixes, but the site looks a lot better, and we also made additional improvements to the “projects” pages (working groups, conferences, collaborations, Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration) and other sections. Let me know if you have any suggestions. (CLAS.Rutgers.edu)
Our Executive Committee is available also for any questions or suggestions. The EC is composed of Professors Andrea Marson, Kenneth Sebastian Leon, Laura Cuesta, Isais Rojas Perez, and Ulla Berg. If you are interested in being appointed to a vacant position until next year’s elections, please let me know.
Our Working Groups will continue functioning this year. I will soon be identifying coordinators for these groups. We also have just organized a working group on Mexico and Central America with significant participation of NJ-based students and scholars. Working groups will continue to receive modest funding and will be encouraged to seek out cosponsorships and contributions. Our revenue from winter/summer session was down slightly again and SAS has not provided any additional funding, so this year’s budget will be tight.
We have a number of events planned for this year, including the symposium on Im/Mobility in Migratory Contexts, organized by Post Doctoral Associate Briana Nichols and postponed because of our labor action last semester. Jorge Marcone will be presenting on his work on Amazonian Peruvian literature and culture.
CLAS is co-sponsoring a major conference on Narratives, Aesthetics, and Afrodiasporic Spirituality in the Contemporary Caribbean, organized by ACLS Emerging Voices Post-Doctoral Fellow (Department of English), Alberto Sosa Cabanas. We are also supporting a major conference on Black Geographies that will meet in New Brunswick and New York City.
If you are interested in receiving updates on the Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration, please join the email list for the project. I just posted a mayor update for the collaboration. (CLAS is involved in highlighting the visibility of this work but as my “boutique” project it is funded by my own research account and external sources.)
This year the CLAS will have various collaborative efforts with the Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies, including co-sponsored speakers. I look forward to developing that synergy. Our Caribbean Studies Working Group will collaborate with the RAICCS and we will be cosponsoring various talks.
CLAS will also be announcing a series of talks that links Latin American immigration scholars with specialists in US Latino Communities—the “North-South Collaboration on Latin American Migration and Latino Studies. Briana Nichols and Javier Gonzalez Cortez are coordinating this work funded by Rutgers Global and co-sponsored by the Latino Studies Research Initiative. This initiative is funded by a grant from Rutgers Global.
This year look for these presentations:
- Historian Lara Putnam, historian. Author of Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age. University of North Carolina Press, 2013. In-person presentation in January.
- A talk with Terri Gordon-Zolov and Eric Zolov, authors of The Walls of Santiago: Social Revolution and Political Aesthetics in Contemporary Chile.
- Panel of speakers on immigrant mobilities in Mexico/Central America (postponed from last May)
- Panel of speakers on the history of indigenous communities
- Support for a major Lydia Cabrera/Caribbean conference.
- Talk by Anthropologist Fernando Montero Castrillo of Columbia University
- Talk by historian Anne Eller, Yale University
- Support for mini conference on immigration detention
- Support for a major conference on black geographies in the Americas.
- Talk by Jorge Marcone on Amazonia in Peruvian literature.
- One or two more talks by Rutgers Professors
- A mid semester lunch hour
- The familiar grad student/faculty research conference in the spring
- Talks by our two Visiting Scholars
We will continue sending the weekly calendar of events and keep individual emails only for major events or announcements.
If you know of new graduate students that would be interested in affiliating with the CLAS, please send me their names. We have a dedicated email list for graduate students, and they have played a critical role in the Working Groups and research work associated with the CLAS. In December we will open the small grants competition for graduate students.
We hope you will continue to check out our events and news updates. If you have any new publications, collaborations, promotions, new courses, or other news, please send it so we can share. We have an active Facebook page and YouTube channel where we can post as well.
Please write me with any questions or suggestions for events or collaborations.
Aldo Lauria Santiago
Director