Trinity Tomes 5 - Geopolitics, Culture and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America

Old Member

24 May 2021 17:30-18:30

Online

Join us to hear from Dr María del Pilar Blanco, Fellow in Spanish, about her recently published book Geopolitics, Culture and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America, which she co-edited with Joanna Page.

Challenging the common view that Latin America has lagged behind Europe and North America in the global history of science, this volume reveals that the region has long been a center for scientific innovation and imagination. It highlights the important relationship among science, politics, and culture in Latin American history.

Scholars from a variety of fields including literature, sociology, and geography bring to light many of the cultural exchanges that have produced and spread scientific knowledge from the early colonial period to the present day. Among many topics, these essays describe ideas on health and anatomy in a medical text from sixteenth-century Mexico, how fossil discoveries in Patagonia inspired new interpretations of the South American landscape, and how Argentinian physicist Rolando García influenced climate change research and the field of epistemology.

Through its interdisciplinary approach, Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America shows that such scientific advancements fuelled a series of visionary utopian projects throughout the region, as countries grappling with the legacy of colonialism sought to modernize and to build national and regional identities.

If you would like to watch the recording of this talk please visit the online events playlist on Trinity College YouTube Channel

About

María del Pilar Blanco

María is Associate Professor in Spanish American Literature and Fellow in Spanish at Trinity. She is currently the Academic Champion at the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). María is the author of essays and articles on topics including Spanish American literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, popular science, modernism, as well as haunting, spectrality, and landscape. She is the author of Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination (2012). María is also co-editor, with Esther Peeren, of Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture (2010) and The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (2013). María’s second monograph project, titled Modernist Laboratories: Science and the Poetics of Progress in Fin-de-Siècle Spanish America, will be published by Oxford University Press.