Consortium on Latin America and the Caribbean

The Kellogg Institute and the Michigan State University’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) plan to develop a consortium for teaching, research and outreach on Latin America and the Caribbean.

The goal of this Consortium is to deepen ongoing collaborative efforts, combine resources to expand opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students at both institutions, promote an exchange of scholars between the two, conduct joint outreach activities, and support collaborative research, creating a vibrant intellectual community of service to the Michigan-Indiana area, the Midwest region, and the nation.

The Consortium brings together MSU's 143 and Notre Dame’s 81 Latin Americanist core and affiliated faculty, as well as two distinguished institutions with complementary strengths. Bolstered by common faculty interests on Mexican, Andean, and Brazilian issues, MSU and ND faculty travel to the partner campus for seminars, workshops, conferences, lectures, graduate training and committees, and collaborative research efforts.  MSU has taken advantage of KI's well-respected Visiting Fellows program to bring prominent Latin Americanist scholars to its campus to give talks or participate in workshops, and musicians and artists occupying KI's Visiting Chair in the Study of Brazilian Culture have performed at MSU. 

This Consortium is the natural outgrowth of years of working together on joint projects. The relationship began in the mid-1990s with the Mexico Small Agricultural Producers Project on the impacts of NAFTA.

Since then, the MSU and ND have co-sponsored two regional workshops on Latin America and a workshop on Brazil, and in 2007 the Midwest Organization of Libraries for Latin America Studies (MOLLAS) is jointly sponsored by the two universities. Recently, CLACS and KI began collaborating on a number of K-12 outreach activities, including a joint Fulbright Group Programs Abroad (GPA) grant proposal to bring secondary school teachers to Costa Rica.