Global Scholars Seminar
By introducing students to undergraduate research, providing them with opportunities to learn more about study and research abroad, and helping them think about ways they might integrate international into their post-graduate lives, the seminar serves as the foundation for the Global Scholars program.
2027 Global Scholars Seminar: Global Meanings of Race
Tuesdays | 3:30-6:00 PM | TBD
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Dr. Luciano Tosta will lead the spring 2027 seminar course. He is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Kansas, where he is also the Director of the Center for Global and International Studies. He has a PhD in Comparative Literature and a MA in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies from Brown University as well as a master's degree in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. His research focuses on Cultural Studies, with an emphasis on race and ethnicity in the Americas, the Ibero-American world, and Brazil’s participation in Global Africa. He is the author of Confluence Narratives: Ethnicity, History, and Nation Making in the Americas (Bucknell University Press) and coeditor of two other books: Luso-American Literature: Portuguese-Speaking Authors in the Americas (Rutgers University Press) and Brazil: Nations in Focus (ABC-CLIO). Originally from Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, Prof. Tosta is also the author of more than 30 academic essays published in the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Europe. Before joining the University of Kansas, he taught at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and during his Ph.D. studies at Brown University, he taught at Boston University and Harvard University for three years. In Brazil, he served as Adjunct Professor at the State University of Bahia and Visiting Professor at the Federal University of Bahia.
Course Description:
Global Meanings of Race examines race not as a fixed biological fact but as a shifting set of historical, political, cultural, and visual meanings produced across different societies. Moving beyond a primarily U.S.-centered framework, the course asks how racial categories have been made, contested, lived, and transformed through slavery, colonialism, migration, nationalism, capitalism, law, media, and cultural production around the world.
Through theoretical essays, fiction, memoir, poetry, and film, students will compare racial understandings across the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and the Pacific. The course focuses on Blackness, Indigeneity, whiteness, mestizaje and racial mixture, caste, ethnicity, migration, diaspora, Islamophobia, antisemitism, anti-Asian racism, and the intersections of race with gender, sexuality, class, language, and citizenship. Rather than assuming that “race” has a single universal meaning, students will investigate how it operates differently in distinct national and transnational contexts while also tracing the global circulation of racial ideas, colonial hierarchies, images, and forms of resistance.
The course discusses foundational work in postcolonial studies, Black studies, decolonial thought, diaspora studies, and cultural studies with literary and cinematic works that render the lived experience of racialization. Course readings and film screenings will emphasize the capacity of narrative and visual culture not only to reproduce racial ideologies but also to imagine alternative forms of belonging, memory, solidarity, and liberation. The course design reflects established interdisciplinary approaches that bring literature, film, postcolonialism, and decoloniality into dialogue.
Application process
A complete application will include student essay responses and recommendations from two individuals familiar with your achievements. At least one of your recommendations should come from someone who has taught you in a KU course.
A prompt with a link to the recommendation form is sent once students add their recommenders' names and email addresses to their submission. We encourage students to do this so that faculty members have as much time as possible to receive their request for recommendations and complete them. Recommendations must be submitted by the same deadline as the applications.
Applications for the 2027 Global Scholars cohort will close Monday, Sept. 28, 2026, with finalist interviews taking place on Sunday, Oct. 25.