Panel 3: La Adaptación

Amber Brian is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. She also directs the Latin American Studies Program. Her research and teaching focus on colonial Spanish America. Her publications address the movement of cultural knowledge and historical memory among native individuals and communities as well as between those communities and the dominant political sphere in colonial Mexico. She has published widely on don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (ca. 1578-1650), a mestizo historian connected with the Indian city of Tetzcoco who is a seminal figure in the development of Mexican history. Her first book, Alva Ixtlilxochitl's Native Archive and the Circulation of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico (Vanderbilt, 2016), was awarded honorable mention for MLA’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize. The Native Conquistador: Alva Ixtlilxochitl's Account of the Conquest of Mexico (Penn State Press, 2015) was co-edited and translated with Bradley Benton and Pablo García Loaeza. She completed a second collaborative translation project with Benton, García Loaeza, and Peter B. Villella, for which they received a Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2014-17). In this project they translated and annotated Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s magnum opus, Historia de la nación chichimeca, a highly influential Spanish-language chronicle of pre-Hispanic central Mexico based on indigenous written and oral sources. The result, History of the Chichimeca Nation: Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Seventeenth-Century Chronicle of Ancient Mexico, is forthcoming from the University of Oklahoma Press. Her second monograph looks at questions of imperial authority, native sovereignty, and trans-oceanic communication in sixteenth-century epistolary correspondence between king and vassals.

Source of the image and text: https://spanish-portuguese.uiowa.edu/people/amber-brian

The title of the presentation: "Reading the Conquest in Contemporary Fiction."

Dr. Nemser's research focuses on colonial Latin America, with a special interest in questions of race, materiality, political economy, and indigenous studies/Nahuatl. His first book, Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico (2017), traces a genealogy of the forms and practices of spatial concentration as a technique of colonial governance. It argues that the sites at which specific bodies and objects were brought together for particular ends constitute the condition of possibility for the emergence and consolidation of new racial categories, racialized subjectivities, and theories of race. One of the key questions it considers is the relation between these social formations and specific spatial orders or infrastructures, such as centralized towns, disciplinary institutions, segregated neighborhoods, and general collections. Currently, He is working on a book project about the rise of racial slavery and the development of circulatory infrastructures, primarily roads, in colonial Mexico.

Source of image and text: https://lsa.umich.edu/rll/people/faculty/dnemser.html

The title of the presentation: "Afterlives of Marronage"