The goals of this seminar are to integrate first and second year graduate students into the department and the university, to provide practical information about the department's main fields of expertise and potential career paths, and to provide a space for support and reflection about the milestones and challenges of graduate school. More broadly, this seminar will help students to begin the ongoing tasks of understanding how our discipline work, developing professional habits and practices, and cultivating an identity as a scholar and researcher.

This seminar explores the intersections between Modern architecture and literature in three Latin American cities: Havana, Mexico City, Bogota. How were built environments inhabited and written by novelists and poets? How did architects respond to literary and cultural debates? Nicolas Arroyo, Mario Pani, Rogelio Salmona contributed to constructing a specific Latin American modernity, in dialogue with authors Alejo Carpentier, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Theoretical discussions include critical regionalism, gender and architecture, and environmental context.

Curiosity is the pursuit of knowledge by empirical means. And, while curiosity killed the cat and got Adam and Eve thrown out of the Garden, curiosity becomes perceived in the entire early modern period as the currency of cultural progress. It led to scientific discoveries and life-changing insights derived from exploration, to massive encyclopedic ventures, to intense self-study, to the surveillance of the Inquisition, to the voyeurism of pornography, and to the tremendous popularity of tabloid journalism.

The enslavement and colonization of Africans disarticulated African and Afro-Diasporic historical time and social memory, fragmented by the dispersion and oppression of their/our bodies, cultures, and territories. Lately, memory has reclaimed a central space in politics, particularly concerning minorities, and cinema has become a privileged medium of/for memory. We explore film genres, topics, and aesthetics seen in African and Afro-Brazilian cinemas to recreate pasts, presents, and futures, exploring different forms of memory, from traditional archives (documents, pictures) to memory as an embodied, practiced, and inscribed presence.