Please join us for a lecture: “Parables of Coercion at the End of Islamic Spain” on Thursday, April 17, 1-2:30pm Oak 236

Presented by:  Dr. Seth Kimmel, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia University

Seth Kimmel is an assistant professor in Columbia University’s Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, where he studies and teaches about early modern Iberia. Before coming to Columbia, he was a post-doctoral fellow in Stanford University’s Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities. His current book project is an intellectual history of New Christian assimilation in the long sixteenth century. His other research interests include the history of cartography, debates about religion and secularism, and comparative literature.

The talk argues that both opponents and advocates of Morisco expulsion employed debate about the Morisco period’s endgame to counter a pervasive narrative of imperial decline and to stake their respective claims on contemporary public affairs. The two different archives of arguments and episodes that emerged from this early seventeenth-century debate offered distinct models of regional exemplarity, scriptural exegesis, and textual production. In this way, the apparently chauvinistic struggle over how to eliminate Islam from the Crowns of Castile and Aragon became an engine of scholarly innovation.

Sponsored by and for more information, please contact: Daniel Hershenzon, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Literatures, Cultures & Languages, UConn