Iberian Pathways
My teaching at UC Irvine involves unearthing critical pathways within a broadly-defined Iberian archive—that is, the intellectual, visual and sensorial culture produced within the context of Iberian expansion in Spanish America and other territories during the three and half centuries of Spanish domination. Within this archive, I’m particularly interested in the earliest critical discourses on modernity elicited as a response to imperial expansion, as well as a wide range of critical discourses—textual, aural, pictographic—produced by Indigeneous peoples. The pathways I seek to recuperate are also those that connect the Iberian archive with wider currents of early modern intellectual history, particularly in philosophy and political theory. Lower division courses, organized as lectures, focus on cultural studies and visual culture. Upper division courses and graduate seminars center on the critical reading of philosophical and theological texts, historical accounts, and literary texts.
Projected courses:
Lower Division Courses
- Mexico City, Lived and Imagined.
- Latin American Cityscapes.
- Latin American through Comics: From Sahagun to Jodorwsky.
- Greater Mexico in 20 images.
- Colonial Latin American Literature.
Upper Division Courses
- Conquistadors and Castaways.
- Visionary Women.
- Modernity and the Self.
- Indigenous Historians from Colonial Latin America.
- Polyphony and Memory in the Chronicles of Indies
- From Spiritual Conquest to Amerindian Christianity
- Stream of Life: Writing Beyond the Self.
- Cervantes and Philosophy
Doctoral Seminars
- Indigenous Inscription: Alternative Literacies in the Americas. s23.
- Critical Theory Workshop: Flowering Voices. swf24.
- “Tupi or not Tupi”: Translating Otherness in Colonial Latin America