The Center for Latin American and Caribbean
Studies (CLACS) at New YorkUniversity is an
interdisciplinary teaching, research, and public information program. It is a
home for a small core of dedicated CLACS faculty and a touchstone for
approximately 130 affiliated faculty in 20 departments in Arts and Science as
well as 8 professional schools, with special depth at the border between the
social sciences and humanities and in the Andean, Brazilian, Iberian Atlantic and
Caribbean regions. CLACS is designated as a
Title VI National Resource Center (NRC), offering exciting MA programs,
curricular innovation for Masters and Doctoral students across the university
and Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship (FLAS) to support lesser
taught languages of the Americas.
Faculty from across the university take advantage of a variety of research
grants, including individual research grants, collaborative faculty working
groups and interdisciplinary, co-taught courses. The Center provides of
coordinated training to assure the improvement of research competence in the
disciplines and graduate students may also apply for summer research funding
for Master's project or pre-dissertation research.
CLACS also reaches well beyond NYU to promote
public events and training related to Latin America.
CLACS is a leader in innovative training and outreach programs aimed at primary
and secondary education, as well as postsecondary institutions based in the New York area, a forum
for symposia, conferences, colloquium series, and film series and a
clearinghouse for information and coordinated scholarly interaction across the
hemisphere.
The Center opens channels of communication
and encourages the sharing of ideas, knowledge and observations across
disciplinary boundaries, to the mutual benefit of faculty members, students and
the greater New York City community interested
in Latin American and the Caribbean. As
a Title VI National Resource Center (jointly with Columbia University’s
Institute for Latin American Studies), CLACS strives to improve training on and
understanding of the regions of Latin American and the Caribbean in an attempt
to increase the competence of future workers in the fields of teaching, policy,
development and aid, security, and humanitarian endeavors, within and beyond
the university.
Faculty affiliated with CLACS work in many
disciplines and most of the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, with
special strengths in the circum-Caribbean, the Andes and Central America, Brazil,
and the Southern Cone. The Center has a special interest in coordinating a
comparative and relational hemispheric orientation toward Latin American and Caribbean issues of the past and present. It also seeks
to promote transatlantic approaches to the complex interplay of European,
African, and Amerindian social and cultural backgrounds in the genesis of these
regions' hybrid postcolonial realities.
Areal scholarship at NYU is especially deep
at the border between the humanities and the social sciences, where literature,
music, the arts, and communicative media find their context in embodied social
experience. Center faculty have expertise in cultural policy, performance,
memory and heritage, narrative, indigenous social movements, race and
nationalism, neoliberal policies and movements opposing them, populism,
migration and social justice, and the study of urban life. Within the region's
cities and across its diasporas, many study the striking coexistence of deeply
stratified populations and widespread cosmopolitanism and avant-garde
sensibilities, which can be found equally among the very rich and the very
poor. Rather than simply providing a window through which North Americans may
observe Latin America and the Caribbean, the
Center seeks to serve as a bridge to them. This is especially appropriate for
an institution located in New York City, a
cosmopolitan hub of migration, communications, and decision making involving
and directly affecting Latin America and the Caribbean.
