ENROLL

Jennifer L Schaefer

This course analyzes constructions of gender and sexuality in Latin America from the pre-colonial and colonial periods through nation building in the nineteenth century and globalization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing on sources including testimonies, legal documents, memoirs, and art, it considers how social, political, and economic structures created unequal power relations as well as how individuals moved within these frameworks, at times even challenging them. In particular, it explores how the racial and ethnic inequalities created through conquest, colonialism, and slavery both shaped and were shaped by gender and sexuality, as well as how these inequalities persisted.

Serena R Zabin

Far from being a single entity, America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a world of vibrant, polyglot, globally linked, and violent societies. In this course we will learn how the enslavement of Africans and Native Americans created a state of war that bridged Europe, America, and Africa. We will examine how indigenous resistance to European settlement reshaped landscapes and cultures. We will focus throughout on the daily lives of the women and men who created and shaped the vast world of early America.