CUNY Latin American/Latinx Studies Symposium

SAVE THE DATE

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Alejandro de la Fuente, Harvard University

SPECIAL GUEST:José Luis Cruz, Executive Vice Chancellor and University Provost, CUNY

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL! – We are celebrating new beginnings with a virtual symposium on the present and future of Latin American/Latinx studies at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY and beyond.The symposium, co-sponsored by The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Office of Academic Affairs at LaGuardia Community College, celebrates the completion of our three-year NEH grant to enrich Latin American Studies at LaGuardia, and seeks to connect our programs with other CUNY units and beyond.

The theme is The Present and Future of Latin American/Latinx Studies at CUNY and Beyond: Building Bridges. The symposium will open with welcoming remarks by Kenneth Adams, President of LaGuardia Community College. The keynote address for the morning session, on the development of Afro-Latin American Studies, will be delivered by Alejandro de la Fuente, Robert Woods Bliss, Professor of Latin American History and Economics; Professor of African and African American Studies and of History; Director, Afro-Latin American Research Institute, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. A historian of Latin America and the Caribbean who specializes in the study of comparative slavery and race relations, Professor de la Fuente’s works on race, slavery, law, art, and Atlantic history have been published in Spanish, English, Portuguese, Italian, German, and French. The first panel, organized by Joy Sanchez-Taylor of LaGuardia Community College and moderated by Jillian Báez of Hunter College, focuses of the present and future of Latinx Studies and will close the morning session.

The afternoon session will open with an update from José Luis Cruz, Executive Vice Chancellor and University Provost of The City University of New York, about the $3 million Mellon Foundation-funded initiative to reimagine and further develop CUNY programs in Black, race and ethnic studies. It will be followed by a panel on African Art and Aesthetics organized by Ana María Hernández of LaGuardia Community College and moderated by Shelly Eversley, Provost’s Faculty Fellow and Interim Chair of Black and Latinx Studies at Baruch College, and Director of Transformational Learning in the Humanities, an initiative at CUNY funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The third panel, organized by Rebecca Tally of LaGuardia Community College, will focus on Atlantic and Caribbean history and will feature renowned scholar Ernesto Bassi Arévalo (Cornell University) among other distinguished guests. Conference registration details and program updates will be included in our next mailings.

Please address questions to the symposium organizers:

• Hugo Fernández (Humanities/Art/Photography): hufernandez@lagcc.cuny.edu
• Ana María Hernández (ELA/Modern Languages): hernandezan@lagcc.cuny.edu
• William Fulton (Humanities/Music): wfulton@lagcc.cuny.edu
• Joy Sanchez-Taylor (English): jsanchez-taylor@lagcc.cuny.edu
• Rebecca Tally (Social Sciences/History): rtally@lagcc.cuny.edu