Resolved young stellar populations in star-forming regions of the Magellanic Clouds**This paper was presented at the workshop on Star-Forming Dwarf Galaxies held in Kolymbari, Crete on 29 September–3 October 2008, http://star-forming-dwarfs.org/.

Abstract

The Magellanic Clouds (MCs), our neighboring dwarf galaxies, offer an outstanding variety of stellar systems, ranging from compact star clusters in various stages of evolution to open clusters and young stellar associations. The latter, being the loci where stars are still forming, are considered the best tracers of recent star formation. In this paper, I present collective observational results on the detection of stellar associations in different galaxies and discuss the issue of these stellar concentrations representing a specific scale of star formation in space and time. I also review previous results on the intermediate- and high-mass stellar content of associations in the MCs, and discuss them in terms of their initial mass function. Finally, I present the latest findings on the low-mass pre-main sequence stellar content of associations in the MCs, achieved with the Hubble Space Telescope and I discuss the detection of candidate young stellar objects in the vicinity of these systems achieved with Spitzer Space Telescope. These developments offer an exceptionally detailed picture of the star formation process and its products in our neighboring galaxies. As a consequence, star-forming regions and their stellar associations in the MCs are certainly the best local templates of extragalactic star formation, providing the basis for star formation studies in other distant dwarf galaxies.