Gerszten Lectures: Fall 2020

Please join us for the first part of our year-long Gerszten Lecture series! For Fall 2020, we welcome Professor Ralph Bauer (University of Maryland-College Park) to share his new work on the Maya K'iche' book, Popol Wuj.

Click here to register for the seminar and/or lecture, both of which will be hosted on Zoom. Links and passwords will be sent to registered participants. Registration will close on Sept. 14. Please contact Allison Bigelow with questions.

Seminar: "The Alchemy of Conquest," Tuesday, Sept. 22, 6:30-7:30 pm

Lecture: "The Matter of the Popol Vuh: Death, Transformation, and Survival in Early (Latin) American Indian Literatures," Friday, Sept. 25, 4:00-6:00 pm

"The Matter of the Popol Vuh: Death, Transformation, and Survival in Early (Latin) American Indian Literatures" investigates the interactions between sixteenth-century European alphabetical literacy and Indigenous materialities and semioses, focusing on the Popol Vuh (Book of Council). Destruction, death, transformation, and survival are the central themes of the book's material history, as it transformed from Maya and Nahua graphic writing into Maya alphabetic script and Spanish translation. But destruction, death, transformation, and survival are also the dominant themes of the "matter" of the Popol Vuh--the content of its stories and the lessons it contained, focusing as they do on the survival of matter through perpetual transformation. To learn more abou the Popol Wuj at UVA, click here.

Ralph Bauer, a leading scholar of inter-American literatures from the pre-Columbian and colonial eras, is the author of 70 research articles and two field-changing books on the early literatures and histories of the Americas: The Alchemy of Conquest: Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the New World (UVA Press, 2019) and The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures (Cambridge UP, 2003 and 2008). He is the translator of An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru: by Titu Cusi Yupanqui (U of Colorado P, 2005) and co-editor of Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: empires, texts, identities (UNCP, 2009, with Jose Antonio Mazzotti), The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500-1900 (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2015, with Kimberly Coles, Carla Peterson, and Zita Nunes), Entangled Trajectories: integrating Native and Early Modern European studies. A special issue of Colonial Latin American Review v. 26 (2017, with Marcy Norton), and Translating Nature: Transcultural Histories of Early Modern Science (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019, with Jaime Marroquin Arredondo).

These events are made possible by generous support from the Gerszten family. ¡Muchas gracias a la familia Gerszten!

 

 

Location: 
Zoom!
Academic Year: 
2020
Event Photo: 
Event Date: 
Tuesday, September 22, 2020 6:30 PM to Friday, September 25, 2020 6:00 PM