The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) at New York University is an interdisciplinary teaching, research, and public information program. It is a Title VI National Resource Center, offering FLAS fellowship support for graduate students and support for faculty and graduate student research, a panoply of colloquia and conferences, and outreach programs focusing on primary and secondary education in the New York area. The Center opens channels of communication and encourages the sharing of ideas and observations across disciplinary boundaries, to the mutual benefit of both faculty members and students. Over fifty NYU faculty members and from two to ten visiting and adjunct professors each semester constitute the directly associated staff of the Center. The Center and its consortium partner, the Institute for Latin American Studies (ILAS) at Columbia University , formed NYCCLAS, the New York City Consortium for Latin American Studies.

Faculty affiliated with CLACS work in many disciplines and countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, with special strengths in the Caribbean, the Andes, Brazil, and Venezuela . The Center has a special interest in Caribbean issues and in coordinating a comparative and relational Hemispheric orientation towards Latin American and Caribbean issues of the past and present, and in promoting trans-Atlantic approaches to the complex interplay of European, African, and Amerindian social and cultural backgrounds in the genesis of these regions’ hybrid postcolonial realities. Latin Americanist and Caribbeanist strengths at NYU are especially deep at the border between the humanities and the social sciences, where literature, music, and the arts, and communicative media, find their context in embodied social experience. Center faculty have special expertise in cultural policy, performance, memory and heritage, narrative, indigenous social movements, race and nationalism, migration and social justice, and in the study of urban life and the confluence in the region’s cities, and in their connections with the US, of deeply stratified populations where cosmopolitanism and avant garde sensibilities 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 between 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.

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