New EMR Latinx Studies Courses for Spring 2026!

EMR 179

This course examines the vibrant and evolving field of Afro-Latinx Studies within a broad hemispheric and diasporic framework. Through an interdisciplinary lens, we will study the presence, contributions, and cultural expressions of Afro-descendants in Latin America and across their diasporas in the United States and beyond. Students will engage with a wide array of sources, including scholarly essays, memoirs, poetry, visual art, music, film, and documentary, in order to analyze how Afro-Latinx identity and representation intersect with histories of colonialism, slavery and its afterlives, anti-Blackness, and transnationalism. Class discussions will focus on the erasure of Blackness within nation-building processes of mestizaje along with decolonial projects of healing and resistance articulated by Afro-Latinx peoples through cultural production, social activism, and global diasporic networks. Figures such as Afro-Chicanx poet Ariana Brown, rapper Cardi B, and visual artist Carlos Martiel will be studied alongside community narratives that illuminate intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and media representation. By centering Afro-Latinx experiences, the course seeks to reshape understandings of culture, nationhood, and identity while situating them within the wider histories of the Afro-diaspora.

EMR 181

This interdisciplinary seminar introduces students to the field of medical humanities through a Latinx studies lens. Moving beyond medicine as science, the course highlights how literature, history, philosophy, media, and the arts shape our understanding of health, illness, and healing. We will explore how Latinx writers, artists, and physicians portray experiences of care and injury in ways that expose the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and power within medical and public health systems. Key topics include the colonial legacies of medical discourse, migration and health inequities, gendered and queer experiences of illness, and the impact of epidemics and public health crises on racialized communities.

In this seminar, we will focus specifically on Latinx and Caribbean cultural and artistic production to examine how writers, artists, and physicians depict health, illness, and the intersectionally racialized body. Materials will range from clinical research that looks at trauma at a cellular and biological level to documentaries such as La operación (1982), which discusses the forced sterilization of Puerto Rican women during the 1950s and 1960s. We will also discuss nineteenth-century canonical works that frame racialized and gendered bodies as sites of pathology, to contemporary texts that grapple with queer and (Afro-)Latinx experiences of racial wounding, disease, and healing. Texts such as Rafael Campo’s What the Body Told (1996), Rita Indiana’s Tentacles (2015), or Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints (2002) will serve as case studies for analyzing how creative expression can be a tool of biomedical critique.