'Explores societies generated in the Americas by several widely distributed export crops. Multinational and cross-cultural comparisons holding constant the crop itself allows a focus on the possible variations by time and place in each commodity's technologies, labor systems, farm sizes, and social structure; their political and social dynamics; the problematic features of capitalism in agriculture, or if, how, and when do peasants become farmers and farming agribusiness?

'This seminar offers an interrogation of the ways in which Latinas and Latinos are represented in the cinema. We will explore early portrayals of Latinas and Latinos in film history and then explore contemporary cinema with a focus on race, class, gender and sexuality in these representations. Employing multiple aesthetic and disciplinary approaches, we will analyze commercial films alongside independent films with particular attention to the market-driven and political mandates of these projects.

'This course offers an interrogation of overt and embedded narratives of migrants and the migration process in popular and documentary film, paying specific attention to cinematic representations of non-citizen bodies confronting migration, deportation, labor, acculturation, and anti-immigrant hysteria. Film screenings and class discussions comprise the interpretative lens through which students will examine the aesthetic, cultural, economic, gendered, historical, political, racial and sexual dimensions of cultural texts.

'This course offers an interdisciplinary approach to the study of feminist ideologies among Latinas throughout the United States. Employing a range of sources from archival texts to artistic images and ethnographies, we will study the histories and representations of Latina feminist theories across academic and aesthetic approaches.

'The course provides an overview of current and past social conditions of Latinas and Latinos within the U.S. We will address laws, policies and institutions that shape the complexity of Latinas'/os' social location and serve as critical sites of resistance. The course addresses legal constructions of race and citizenship, nomenclature, border politics, public health, education, and labor. We will consider the critical intersections of class, gender and sexuality as well as inequality in relation to other persons of color.

'Exploration of the history of Afro-Latin American populations since Independence within and outside the nation-state. We will question why and how to study those whose governments define them not as peoples of African descent but as part of a mixed-race majority of Hispanic cultural heritage, who themselves may often have supported this policy, and who may have had compelling reasons to avoid official scrutiny.

'Examines the confrontation, assimilation, and transformation of Amerindian, African, and European cultures in Latin America from the sixteenth century to the present. Focuses on the processes in which distinctive self-images emerged in the region and how these images have been challenged and changed over time. Uses films, literature, and folk traditions to complement scholarly analysis of the emergence of a New World mentality.'

'In this seminar we question the distinction between myth and history and consider the relationship of historical consciousness to memory, forgetting, and other types of temporal awareness. We then examine the relationships among literacy, art, nationalism, and the invention of tradition and test the limits of ethnohistory. Finally, we look at the ways in which relics, museums, and tourism have all helped make history--as fact, experience, or commodity--possible.'

'This seminar explores the formation of the 'modern' or 'black' South Atlantic through an eclectic variety of historical and ethnographic texts. We will read early European travelogues of cannibalism and savagery in the New World, as well as accounts of Muslim slave revolts in Brazil, Cuban tobacco and sugar, the Haitian Revolutions obscured place in history, and a murder mystery.

'This seminar focuses on the anthropological study of the legal field. The class will begin with a survey of some classical texts that underpin the legal thought in the modern era. We will then see how anthropologists contributed to the study of law by conceptualizing it as part of larger socio-political processes and as a field that includes social relations, processes, and practices.