Director's Message

Prof. Aldo Lauria Santiago

The Center offers its own interdisciplinary undergraduate major and minor. We offer great flexibility in choosing courses about Latin America, the Caribbean and Diasporas in the humanities and social sciences. As a unit within the School or Arts and Sciences the courses for our major and minor intersect with many other majors and minors within SAS including Spanish/Portuguese, Anthropology, Sociology, Latino & Caribbean Studies, History, Political Science and Geography. Students from other schools including SEBS and SCI should contact me to explore how their coursework may count as elective credits in the Latin American Studies major and minor.

As Director, I provide individualized advising on course selection, fulfilling the language requirement, study abroad, and graduate school and career opportunities. As you can see from our course list, students have many options every semester and can carve out more focused regional or country-specific specialties. Our graduates have pursued many different trajectories informed by their coursework and training including public service, graduate school, public health, business and work with NGO's. We are committed to helping our students be successful in their goals.

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Start-of-the-year Note--2025-2026

28 August 2025

Dear CLAS Community,

Welcome (back) to a new academic year!

I was recently appointed Dean Wade as CLAS Director for the balance of the ordinary three-year term for which I was elected (as a single candidate) by CLAS faculty affiliates. Attached is my report for the recent academic year.

For the start of this year, I have a few important news items:

Professor Marcy Schwartz (Spanish/Portuguese) retired! The CLAS will miss your dedicated involvement all these years! …hope to see you once in a while.
We have a new colleague in Political Science: Professor Jana Morgan. Her work focuses on political inclusion and exclusion in Latin America. She has an impressive record. Welcome!
We did not receive authorization to continue with our Post-Doctoral Associate position. A real loss. Vierelina will complete her second year, and after that, I will continue to lobby for the return of this important resource.
We received the first payment from SAS for income sharing from summer and winter teaching. This will help with our events planning and allow us to increase the funding dedicated to graduate research grants after last year’s cut.
I increased the preliminary funding assigned to the CLAS Working Groups for programming to $1000. If the working groups do not show signs of life, these funds will be reassigned.
SAS cancelled one of our 101 sections for the Fall term. Now all three remaining sections are at 100% enrollment, and we have an unmet demand for seats.
Our long-standing instructor, Geisa Rocha is retiring. We thank her for her years of work teaching for the CLAS.
We have already scheduled a few events:
- Fall welcome and reception. Wed Sept 17, 5:00-6:30 PM. Place to be announced.
- On October 9, 5 pm, a talk with Colombian activist and analyst Alberto Yepes, a lawyer and an internationally well-known expert on the peace process and human rights. Co-sponsored with the Colombian Human Rights Network.
- Our Fall Research Symposium is scheduled for Friday, November 7. Summer grant awardees and other graduate students will present their work. I encourage faculty to participate as well. Graduate students often discover the specialties and interests of faculty across departments late in their careers at RU.
- Pablo Piccato (History, Columbia University) will present his recent work on violence in Mexico on Nov 29, 12 noon.
Javier Gonzalez (History) will continue as our communications assistant. Send him any news you want posted to the website or included in the weekly email.
Nancy will continue as our dedicated admin.
The Rutgers/Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration, which I began a few years back under the CLAS umbrella, has taken off. We recently completed the first year of a multi-year, million-dollar grant provided by the Mellon Foundation (PRAC.Rutgers.edu). If you find any way you want to collaborate with this work, please let me know.

For this year, I anticipate these initiatives,

Continuation of the “Violences in Latin America” series with three guest speakers.
A symposium on urbanism and cities in Latin America in the Spring term, organized by Andrea Restrepo (from the Bloustein School).
A shared theme on Climates, Environments, and Migration with Latino/Caribbean Studies.
An update on current events in Cuba and Puerto Rico.
One or two lunchtime presentations by graduate students.

I encourage the CLAS community to find programming that fits with or that may be in conversation with these efforts. I would like to encourage discussion of various authoritarian states and movements of both left and right; migration that remains south of the US/Mexico border; and the impact of the deportation regime in the US.

As usual, the work of the CLAS is most productive when it is shared, so I encourage your participation and engagement. I will soon put out a call to faculty for EC membership (only two meetings a year!) and will make sure to recruit a graduate student rep.

Finally, if you identify new faculty or students who might be interested in joining the CLAS, please send me their info or make sure they join our general email, faculty, and/or graduate student email lists.

Finally, please check out our list of affiliated faculty: https://clas.rutgers.edu/people/affiliated-faculty.

Please send us your news!

Gracias y saludos

Aldo Lauria Santiago

Director