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About LAIC

The Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, housed in Casa Hispánica (at 612 West 116th Street in New York City), has long enjoyed an international reputation as a center for Hispanic and Lusophone studies.

In addition to providing students with a commanding linguistic preparation in Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan, the department offers a flexible and varied undergraduate program that enables them to study the cultural manifestations of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds in all historical periods—from the medieval to the globalized present—and in a variety of cultural contexts: the Iberian Peninsula, Latin America, the former colonies of Portugal, and the United States.

The aim of the department’s graduate program is to train students to become first-rate scholars and teachers who are theoretically sophisticated and attuned to the issues, polemics, and approaches that define the profession currently as a field of intellectual endeavor.

Casa Hispánica is also the home of the Hispanic Institute for Latin American & Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. Founded in 1920 as the Instituto de las Españas, the Institute’s central aim is to sponsor and disseminate research on Iberian and Latin American cultures. The Institute has also published since 1934 the Revista Hispánica Moderna, a distinguished journal in Latin American and Iberian criticism and theory, and recipient of the 2009 Council of Editors of Learned Journals’ Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial Achievement.