The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS) is pleased to announce the arrival of four visiting scholars from the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras (UPRRP), who are visiting U-M from August 3-9, 2019. LACS will host the visitors as part of the ongoing U-M/UPR Outreach Collaboration. The scholars will utilize U-M resources and libraries in order to research and develop materials for new courses they have proposed to teach at the Rio Piedras campus.

A Title VI National Resource Center grant from the U.S. Department of Education funds the U-M/UPR Outreach Collaboration. The purpose of the collaboration is to create spaces for conversations about new research and curriculum development projects and facilitate academic exchanges for professors, university students, and K-12 teachers and their students in Puerto Rico.

During this visit, the four scholars from UPR will develop materials for proposed courses on a particular theme relevant to Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, or Latin America more broadly.

Érika Fontánez Torres, Professor in the UPR Law School, will design a course on property and housing law in Latin America and the Caribbean. Melody Fonseca Santos, Professor in the Department of Political Science at UPR, will work to create a course on Caribbean political thought. Carlos Pabón Ortega, Professor in the Department of History at UPR, will develop a course on leftist intellectuals and political imaginaries in Latin America and the Caribbean since the Cold War. Finally, Windy Cosme Roasario, Professor in the Interdisciplinary Studies program at UPR and a doctoral student in the Department of History, will join representatives from LACS and the University of Michigan’s International Institute to design implementation strategies for future collaborative activities between U-M and UPRRP.

Juan Hernández, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at UPR, leads the collaboration with Alana Rodríguez and Tim Lorek from LACS at U-M.

For more information about this project, see https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/umich-upr/