Essay in: After Conversion: Iberia and the Emergence of Modernity, 336-57. Edited by Mercedes Gar... more Essay in: After Conversion: Iberia and the Emergence of Modernity, 336-57. Edited by Mercedes García-Arenal. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016.
Essay in: After Conversion: Iberia and the Emergence of Modernity, 336-57. Edited by Mercedes Gar... more Essay in: After Conversion: Iberia and the Emergence of Modernity, 336-57. Edited by Mercedes García-Arenal. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016.
The dream of knowing all that there is to know is a powerful one, even or perhaps especially for ... more The dream of knowing all that there is to know is a powerful one, even or perhaps especially for those of us finely attuned to the limits of our own knowledge. Technologies of manuscript culture, print media, and electronic cataloging have each in their respective moment helped both to keep alive the cyclical lure of comprehensiveness and to render it impossible ever to attain. More specifically, the universal dictionaries, bibliographies, histories, and libraries of the late medieval and early modern period were pragmatic attempts to organize and protect a body of knowledge that pretended to be total, yet the processes of selection and summarizing that characterized these genres contributed to the loss as well as the conservation of information. That the intellectual aspiration of total knowledge sometimes overlaps with the imperial objective of domination is a feature of the rhetoric of universality that was not lost on early modern scholars and monarchs. These early modern tensions remain with us in our late modern period too, as a universalizing rhetoric characterizes bibliographic practice in the digital environment, and disciplines like world literature and global history seek to find their institutional and intellectual footing.
What are the histories of projects that seek to attain and retain universal knowledge? What is the relationship between the “bibliotheca” as an architecture space and a genre of early modern bibliography? How do the early and late modern globalizations of knowledge relate to each other? Why do we continue to dream of universal libraries, automated archives, and similar fictions of exhaustiveness? We welcome papers for what we hope will be a series of panels at the 2017 RSA in Chicago that respond to these and related questions about the material qualities of the lure and limitations of universal knowledge.
Please send a one-page CV and an abstract of no more than 150 words to Seth Kimmel (srk29@columbia.edu) and Miguel Martínez (martinezm@uchicago.edu) by May 31, 2016.
The exploratory workshop was convened by Paola Molino, at that time Alexander von Humboldt Postdo... more The exploratory workshop was convened by Paola Molino, at that time Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität (LMU) in Munich, in collaboration with Martina Siebert, Guy Burak, and Dagmar Riedel. The project's Final Report was written by Paola Molino, in collaboration with Martina Siebert, Guy Burak, and Dagmar Riedel and with contributions by Anne MacKinney, and submitted to the Forum Transregionale Studien in February 2017.
Please join students, alumni, faculty, and friends of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese La... more Please join students, alumni, faculty, and friends of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at NYU for a humanistic response to the US presidential election and the vandalism and hate crimes that have occurred throughout New York City, including on our own campus, in its wake.
“Protest and Dissimulation: Muslims and Other Minorities in the Spanish-Speaking World” will explore the challenges faced by religious and ethnic minority communities in the Spanish-speaking world from the Middle Ages through the present day and examine the strategies that those communities used to resist, circumvent, survive, and even flourish under the pressure of those challenges. Through discussion and conversation, the evening will yield questions and modes of thinking that are grounded in the unique histories, literatures, and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world and that participants, attendees, and discussants can carry with them out into the wider contemporary world that is presenting its own evolving set of challenges to many modern communities.
This round-table and teach-in will take place on Thursday, December 1, from 6-8pm in the Great Room of 13-19 University Pl. A light supper will be served and attendees are encouraged to continue the discussion over the meal. The event will be live-streamed and archived online.
Speakers will include:
Farah Dih, NYU: "A Caste Society in the First Spanish Modernity" Erica Field, NYU: “Dissimulation, Piety, and Fear” Sibylle Fischer, NYU: "Stop Whining: On Politics of Racelessness and Executive Violence in Spanish America" Nicholas Jones, Bucknell University: “Do Black Lives Matter in Spanish Early Modernity? Blackness, Cognitive Dissonance, Dissimulation” Seth Kimmel, Columbia University: “The Ends of Multiculturalism” S.J. Pearce, NYU: “Medieval Jews and Muslims in the Modern Nation”
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What are the histories of projects that seek to attain and retain universal knowledge? What is the relationship between the “bibliotheca” as an architecture space and a genre of early modern bibliography? How do the early and late modern globalizations of knowledge relate to each other? Why do we continue to dream of universal libraries, automated archives, and similar fictions of exhaustiveness? We welcome papers for what we hope will be a series of panels at the 2017 RSA in Chicago that respond to these and related questions about the material qualities of the lure and limitations of universal knowledge.
Please send a one-page CV and an abstract of no more than 150 words to Seth Kimmel (srk29@columbia.edu) and Miguel Martínez (martinezm@uchicago.edu) by May 31, 2016.
“Protest and Dissimulation: Muslims and Other Minorities in the Spanish-Speaking World” will explore the challenges faced by religious and ethnic minority communities in the Spanish-speaking world from the Middle Ages through the present day and examine the strategies that those communities used to resist, circumvent, survive, and even flourish under the pressure of those challenges. Through discussion and conversation, the evening will yield questions and modes of thinking that are grounded in the unique histories, literatures, and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world and that participants, attendees, and discussants can carry with them out into the wider contemporary world that is presenting its own evolving set of challenges to many modern communities.
This round-table and teach-in will take place on Thursday, December 1, from 6-8pm in the Great Room of 13-19 University Pl. A light supper will be served and attendees are encouraged to continue the discussion over the meal. The event will be live-streamed and archived online.
Speakers will include:
Farah Dih, NYU: "A Caste Society in the First Spanish Modernity"
Erica Field, NYU: “Dissimulation, Piety, and Fear”
Sibylle Fischer, NYU: "Stop Whining: On Politics of Racelessness and Executive Violence in Spanish America"
Nicholas Jones, Bucknell University: “Do Black Lives Matter in Spanish Early Modernity? Blackness, Cognitive Dissonance, Dissimulation”
Seth Kimmel, Columbia University: “The Ends of Multiculturalism”
S.J. Pearce, NYU: “Medieval Jews and Muslims in the Modern Nation”