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UW-Milwaukee’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), along with UW-Madison’s Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies (LACIS) and Institute for Regional and International Studies (IRIS), and Florida International University’s Kimberly Green Latin America and Caribbean Center (LACC) are pleased to present our 2026 Summer Teacher Institute: Contemporary Religious Life in Latin America and the Caribbean

Date, Time, Location

• Location: UW-Milwaukee (in person)
• July 6-8, 2026

Registration and Payment

Payment in full is required in advance through your registration form, but reimbursement is available if requested by May 21 (45 days prior to reservation start). Thank you for your understanding!

Registration deadline (institute and optional lodging): May 22, 2026. For more information, contact: Monica VanBladel (vanblade@uwm.edu or 414-251-5216).

Summary

This three-day program will examine the variety of religious institutions, practices, and beliefs that characterize daily life across Latin America and the Caribbean, adding complexity to the popular understanding of the region as historically Catholic. Presentations will highlight the social, artistic, and political dimensions of religions and spirituality, considering topics like the rise of evangelicalism, Afro-Caribbean belonging and activism, and Indigenous communities revitalizing traditional knowledges suppressed by missionary efforts. The institute will feature a variety of expert presentations (speakers may include university faculty, journalists, and practitioners), and allow participants time to collaboratively discuss ways to incorporate this material in their existing curriculum.

Open to educators at the K-12 and college levels. More information about our speakers will be shared throughout spring!

Program Cost

$90 educators (in-service teacher, librarian, counselor, other staff in K-16 setting) / $30 Education students. Fee includes breakfasts, lunches, and materials.

Lodging

Participants are expected to secure their own lodging. Some lower-cost, apartment-style suites are available through 51���� University Housing (shared apartment with two private bedrooms) – $57/night shared or $114/night single.

Suites are available for the nights of July 5, 6, 7, and 8. Rates include overnight parking for one vehicle for the duration of your stay.

Speaker Bios

We are pleased to be hosting these experts for our 2026 summer institute on Contemporary Religious Life in Latin America and the Caribbean:

• Dr. Robert Brenneman��is Professor of Criminal Justice and Sociology at Goshen College, and his research focuses on the impact of violence and violent social structures on human flourishing. His book Homies and Hermanos: God and Gangs in Central America (Oxford University Press 2011) takes a close-up look at the lives of sixty-three former gang members, many of whom joined an evangelical congregation as part of their attempt to extricate themselves from gang violence. Rob has provided expert witness testimony in more than a dozen asylum cases involving Central American gangs, and is widely published on matters of gangs and violence in Central America, as well as spirituality and religious architecture.
• Dr. Fadeke Castor��is Associate Professor of Religion and Africana Studies at Northeastern University, with research and teaching interests in religion, race, performance, and the intersectional politics of decolonization. As a Yorùba Ifá initiate of Trinidadian heritage, they are inspired by African spiritual engagements with Black liberation imaginaries and the Black radical tradition. Castor is the author of Spiritual Citizenship: Transnational Pathways from Black Power to Ifá in Trinidad (Duke University Press, 2017; Clifford Geertz Prize, 2018) and her current research explores the spiritual ontologies and epistemologies of Black Spiritual praxis as shifting our centers of being and ways of knowing towards collective care, healing, and social transformation.
• Florence Goupil��is a French-Peruvian documentary photographer working between ethnobotany, environmental and human rights, and the living memory of Indigenous communities. While a Pulitzer Center Rainforest Journalism grantee, she published on cultural revitalization of Indigenous knowledges that were historically suppressed by missionary efforts. She has exhibited internationally and published in The New York Times Magazine, BJP, Fisheye, Atmos, and National Geographic. Florence has received numerous awards, including POY Latam Photographer of the Year, the Magnum Foundation “Heat” Fellowship, and the Latin America Professional Award in the 2025 Sony World Photography Awards.
• Dr. Sergio González��is Associate Professor of History at Marquette University. He is a historian of twentieth-century U.S. migration, labor, and religion, and his scholarship explores the intersections between faith and social movements as well as the development of Latino communities in the U.S. Midwest. He is author of Strangers No Longer: Latino Belonging and Faith in Twentieth-Century Wisconsin (University of Illinois Press, 2024) and co-editor of Faith and Power: Latino Religious Politics Since 1945 (New York University Press, 2022). One of his current research projects examines the history of sanctuary movements in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, exploring the pivotal role religious institutions and people of faith have played in developing contemporary social movements for immigrant and refugee justice.
• Dr. Gustavo Morello, SJ, is Professor of Sociology at Boston College and author of Lived Religion in Latin America: An Enchanted Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2021). As a sociologist of religion, Morello’s research focuses on practices: he studies religion as an ongoing human relation with a supra-human power, rather than focusing on institutional mandates or traditional sociological narratives of secularization or the expansion of religious markets. Morello is also author of The Catholic Church and Argentina’s Dirty War (Oxford University Press, 2015) and has studied religious expression in Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile.