The University of California, Santa Barbara, has a strong trajectory in Latin American History. Our PhD program welcomes students interested in all time periods and regions of Latin America. Our faculty's research and teaching cover a very broad range of regions, periods, and subjects: from Mexico to the Caribbean and the Andes and from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, considering key questions in social, political, and cultural history and the history of science. As a result, our students are not only able to pursue research in a wide variety of topics, but also obtain a firm grounding in Latin American history more broadly, with its different historiographies, methodologies, and theoretical perspectives.<br><br>Students in Latin American History complete a sequence of reading seminars covering the key issues, themes, and literature of the colonial period and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (HIST 250A, 250B, and 250C). Beyond this, they have great flexibility to designworking closely with their advisorsindividual programs of study combining more specialized seminars courses on particular themes and regions with independent reading courses to suit their interests. They also obtain the skills'such as palaeography, or digital research skillsnecessary to conduct their research.