This is a political science graduate seminar for students interested in identity politics, broadly defined. We will survey the broad social science literature on identity, beginning with foundational theoretical frameworks from multiple disciplines before exploring the causes, mechanisms, and consequences of identity politicization. The course will take a comparative politics approach to these questions and study contexts around the world, but will also be of interest to students of American politics and political behavior, international relations, and political theory.

This class introduces students to writing genres and the craft of textual analysis in Spanish through the comparative study of works from Latin America and Spain. We will consider a variety of genres like narrative fiction and non-fiction, poetry, drama, essay, testimony, and aphoristic writing. We will also examine visual texts such as comics, films, graphic novels and, possibly, new media genres.  Students will learn how to identify, analyze, and write in Spanish about different literary tropes, rhetorical figures, argumentative forms, and expository methods employed in the selected materials.

This course offers a panoramic overview of Latin American social, political, and cultural history from pre-colonial times to the 20^th century. Topics will include the European conquest and colonization; indigenous societies past and present; 19^th-century wars of Independence, nation-building projects, and intellectual traditions; 20^th-century populism, revolutionary movements, and modernization ideologies; the wave of military dictatorships and the transition to democracy, as well as several cultural and artistic trends from different periods and sub-regions of the continent.