Elizabeth Davis

The Castaway’s Bond: Shipwreck and Survival from Renaissance Poetry to the Fourth Genre

Elizabeth B. Davis, Academy Professor, Associate Professor Emerita, Spanish & Portuguese. The Ohio State University

Elizabeth Davis specializes in literature and culture of early modern Spain. Her research has focused on strands of a Spanish imperial culture that inform both lyric and epic poetry of the period. She is the author of Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain (University of Missouri Press, 2000). Her current research focuses on the infrastructure and culture of early modern Spanish travel, on land, on the seas, in coastal areas and port cities. She has co-edited, with Elizabeth R. Wright, a special issue of Calíope 2014, Vol. 19, No. 1, titled Mare Nostrum?: Navigating the Mediterranean Crosscurrents in Spanish Poetry. Her current book project, tentatively titled The Seafarer’s Bond: Risk, Transaction and Textual Circulation in the Spanish Atlantic World (1544-1660), examines the cultural implications of written transactions (private letters and ones from Armada officers, shipwreck accounts, etc.) on the open seas that textually rephrase Spanish culture across the Iberian Atlantic. Professor Davis served as President of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry during 2014-2017 and as Member and Chair of the Executive Committee for the Division on Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Spanish Prose and Poetry of the Modern Language Association of America (2006-2010).

November 13, 2020

Mariana Favila

Del árbol a la canoa: surcando el mar en Mesoamérica

Mariana Favila Vázquez is Visiting Professor of Archeology at the ENAH (National School of Anthropology and History) and a research associate in the project “Digging into early colonial Mexico: a large-scale computational analysis of 16th century historical sources” of the University of Lancaster, United Kingdom and the Museo de Templo Mayor in Mexico. Her research has focused on indigenous pre-hispanic and colonial navigation traditions in the Mesoamerican cultural area. She has published several articles and a book related to the application of spatial analysis and water routes in Mesoamerica and New Spain.

November 13, 2020

Patricia Seed

Adamastor Still Rules The Cape

Patricia Seed specialties include history of the Early Modern and Colonial European eras, especially in relation to Spanish and Portuguese-speaking cultures. Her fields of interest are history of cartography, comparative history of cartographic design and navigation, large-scale coastal mapping, and Jewish and Islamic influences on the political construction of Latin America. She published To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice, 1574– 1821 in 1992; Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 in 1995, and American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches in 2001. In 2002 she was awarded the American Historical Association’s James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History.

November 13, 2020November 15, 2020

Chet Van Duzer

“Monsters, Exploration, and Maps: The Oceans from Antiquity to 1600”

Chet Van Duzer has published extensively on medieval and Renaissance maps in journals such as Imago Mundi, Terrae Incognitae and Word & Image. He is also the author of Johann Schöner’s Globe of 1515: Transcription and Study, the first detailed analysis of one of the earliest surviving terrestrial globes that includes the New World; and (with John Hessler) Seeing the World Anew: The Radical Vision of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 & 1516 World Maps. His book Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps was published in 2013 by the British Library, and in 2014 the Library of Congress published a study of Christopher Columbus’s Book of Privileges which he co-authored with John Hessler and Daniel De Simone.