After one month of fall registration being open, one course is already full, and a few others have just a few seats left. There’s lots of time yet, all spring and summer long, but two courses with a lot of seats still available are 515 Latin American Lit and 560 African & Caribbean Lit; so I wanted to send this note out across the graduate student community and encourage you to consider these courses for your fall schedule.

515 Latin American Lit will include a live zoom discussion once a week, on Thursday nights, from 7:00-8:20pm eastern. We’re running this course in this way as an experiment, based on feedback from the program-wide survey in which a significant amount of students indicated that they wanted live-zoom choices added to the schedule. Whether or not we run courses in this modality in the future will depend much on whether or not this class draws students. So for any students who want there to be live-zoom options in the program, we need you to stand up for that by registering for this fall 515 course. The course is listed in Connect as running both on Tuesday and Thursday night on zoom, but in fact it will only be on zoom on Thursday nights.

The theme of the 515 Latin American lit course will be Protest and Resistance in Latin American Literature. Students will examine works by the Mexican writer Nellie Campobello, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the Argentine writer Luisa Valenzuela, and the Cuban filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, among others.

The 560 African & Caribbean Lit course will explore works of writers from a variety of African and Caribbean nations. Students in previous instances of this course explored works by writers such as Naguib Mafouz [Egypt], Wole Soyinka [Nigeria], V.S. Naipaul [Trinidad], J.M. Coetzee [South Africa], Nadine Gordimer [South Africa], Derek Walcott [St Lucia], Chimamanda Adichie [Nigeria], Jamaica Kincaid [Antigua], Edwidge Danticat [Haiti], Mariama Ba [Senegal], Tsitsi Dangaremba [Zimbabwe], and Athol Fugard [South Africa]. Some of these writers will likely be included in the class this fall.

Both of these courses will offer students a unique and inspiring experience. On behalf of all of the faculty in the MA program, I hope that our graduate students find a way to fit one or both of these courses into your fall schedule. Please write to cloots@mercy.edu with any questions.