Leslie Offutt
Office: Swift 26
Ext: 5668
Email: offutt@vassar.edu
Leslie S. Offutt, associate professor, earned her B.A. and M.A. degrees in history from the University of California, Riverside, and her Ph.D. degree in colonial Latin American history from UCLA (1982). She has taught Latin American history at Vassar College since 1983, where in addition to being a member of the history department she serves on the steering committee of the International Studies program and is a participating member and former director of the Latin American and Latino/a Studies. She is the author of numerous articles on Hispanic society on the North Mexican frontier in the eighteenth century and on Indian/Hispanic relations in that region. Her book Saltillo 1770¬1810: Town and Region in the Mexican North was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2001.
Her course offerings include History 162 (Latin America: The Aftermath of Encounter), History 262 (Early Latin America to 1750), History 263 (From Colony to Nation: Latin America in the Nineteenth Century), History 264 (The Revolutionary Option? Latin America in the Twentieth Century), plus advanced seminars on the indigenous experience in Latin America and Latin American revolutions. She has frequently taught the program’s introductory course-Latin American Studies 105: Resistance and Struggle in Latin America, now redesigned and redefined as Latin American and Latino/a Studies 105, Conceptualizing Latin and Latino/a America. Since 1999 she has helped to design and co-teach three International Studies 110 courses and study trips, two examining contemporary Cuba (Cuba at the Millennium, 1999, and Cuba in Transition, 2002), and, most recently, a course on Brazil (Envisioning Brazil, 2004).