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 of Arts and Sciences, our major and minor courses 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 achieve their goals.

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2026-2027 Welcome Message

Dear Colleagues,

A slightly delayed start of the year statement. This will be my last year as director of the Center, and I will be encouraging senior faculty to look into serving as a relevo.

This year, we face serious challenges, with a 50% budget cut, which will make it very difficult for us to provide more than just a few graduate student research grants. We have also faced the elimination of our postdoctoral position and student labor budget, and a reduction in our introductory course (101) sections to just one per semester. The School of Arts and Sciences has created these challenging conditions, but I am still hoping to convince Executive Dean Juli Wade to continue supporting what has been, for years, their strongest, most active, and most successful area studies center. I will be circulating a petition soon that you may choose to sign.

Unfortunately, we will not be able to sustain the extensive news and visibility work that we developed during the last few years, including the cohesive weekly calendar.

All the same, this year we will host our research conference on Friday, November 13. Please send me your titles and abstracts by Nov 1 if you are interested in presenting your work. Faculty presentations are more than welcome!

We will also fund our working groups and other requests for support and cosponsorships. Let me know if you would like to organize an event—this is the strongest remaining part of our budget.

Graduate students should look out for the call for research grants a bit later in the semester, once we know our income from summer/winter teaching (we are waiting on that from SAS). The colleagues from RAICCS will be supporting grants that intersect with Caribbean Studies, and we are very glad that we’ll have that support for our graduate students. Also, please share our info with new graduate students.

This Thursday, September 24, we will be hosting Colombian human rights leader Nestor Moreno. The event will be at 5 pm in A266 Lucy Stone Hall. Some info here.

Having concluded the very successful Violences talk series, we will be emphasizing this year presentations on indigenous studies and Latinos/Latin America intersections. Also expect some robust programming from the Hemispheric Indigenous Studies Working Group (write to Josh Anthony if interested). I will also be organizing a panel on New York City’s Hispanic worlds, 1850-1950. We will also have Yale Professor Anne Eller present her new book on the Caribbean, Other 1898s, and a talk by Prof. Zeb Tortorici.

The Rutgers/Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration, which began rooted in the Center, has blossomed with a million-dollar grant from the Mellon Foundation. This is the third year of the program, and we will also host a large conference on Puerto Rico history in 2028. It is likely the foundation will support our proposal for another three years and the doubling of our budget, which would bring the number of year-round archival interns and staff from 40 to 60. This summer, we hosted a graduate student from Camden who had just completed the MA in history program. In past years, we have hosted New Brunswick graduate students Rosa Cordero, Laurian Rosa, and Santos Cardona as Rutgers summer interns. If you have suggestions for how to connect Rutgers with the program, please reach out.

The work our graduate assistants did in the last couple of years, making visible and highlighting the work of faculty and students, should make it clear that this community is worth investing in and supporting.

Please reach out if you have questions, have ideas for events (especially those related to the rapidly changing political conditions in the region today), or would like to participate in leading one of our working groups.

Gracias y saludos

Aldo A. Lauria Santiago

Director, Center for Latin American Studies