Field Seminar in Latin American History: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (420-2-20)

Instructors

Lina Britto
Harris Hall 304
Professor Lina Britto is a Colombian-American historian and journalist. She received her Ph.D. in Latin American and Caribbean History from New York University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Harvard University. She is the author of Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia's First Drug Paradise (University of California Press, 2020), and co-editor of Histories of Solitude and Histories of Perplexity, two volumes on Colombia, 19th to 21st centuries (Routledge, 2024). Her teaching philosophy is to help students to develop critical reasoning skills, analytical abilities, and organizational capacities. She uses multiple written, oral, audiovisual, cartographic, and pop-culture materials in her teaching. Her interdisciplinary approach includes history, journalism, anthropology, and cultural analysis to explore the past and its connection with the present.

Meeting Info

Harris Hall room 101: Fri 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

Modern Latin America Field Seminar introduces graduate students to some of the principal topics, debates, and literatures about the region's history since the Age of Revolutions to the neoliberal turn. It covers the most important economic, political, social, and cultural questions. It also analyzes the methodological strategies used by historians while writing about different countries. The course does not pretend to be inclusive of all historical approaches. Rather, it aims to introduce students to some of the most relevant historiographical discussions and invite them to go beyond narrow North American points of view about the neighbors to the South. The course helps students in training to become instructors to examine how Latin Americans view themselves and understand the region's histories under different lenses.

Registration Requirements

Graduate students only.

Learning Objectives

The course is thus designed to further our study and understanding of the historiography, meaning the different ways scholars have written about and conceived of Latin American history and the historical materials available. For our purposes, the substance of the books and articles selected for common reading is secondary in importance to the major themes, theoretical frameworks, source base, and methods. Students are encouraged to find their own voices and at the same time to do some justice to the works of others. Hence, the method is twofold. On the one hand, we will examine some "classic" works and influential authors in the field. On the other, we will work to find points of contact between your dissertation research and the historiography.

Evaluation Method

Papers and oral presentations

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Prerequisite: MA or PhD History student