Please join us for "The Spanish Atlantic on Paper: Methods on Material Culture and Critical Bibliography," on Thursday & Friday, April 9–10, taking place at LLILAS Benson & the Institute for Historical Studies on UT Campus.

What does it mean for scholars to think with and through materiality? How does attention to material culture reshape how we research, teach, curate, and conceptualize the Spanish Atlantic world and its archives? What distinctive features of Spanish Atlantic paper cultures emerge when they are placed in conversation with other imperial, national, and linguistic formations across the Atlantic world? 

The symposium convenes a diverse group of scholars working on textual, visual, and material cultures across the Spanish Atlantic world and beyond, from the sixteenth through the twentieth century, to explore these questions. Participants will engage in interdisciplinary conversations about research methods, curatorial practices, and pedagogical experiences, reframing the Spanish Atlantic archive through the material dimensions of meaning and making. Together, we will consider questions about the centrality of media, form, and genre; historical actors’ own understanding of material culture; the politics of archival practices, process of digitization, and curatorial approaches; and the multiple ways textual and visual artifacts can be interrogated today from the perspective of critical bibliography. 

Our goal is to critically reflect on how the study of materiality can transform the ways we think about the historical geographies of the “Spanish empire,” the “New World,” “Latin America,” and the “United States,” their shifting borderlands, and their entanglements with other imperial and national formations. Seeking to move beyond conventional divides between North and South Atlantic, and between Anglo and Latin America, we propose the Spanish Atlantic world as a powerful laboratory for examining the confluences and dissonances across print, manuscript, visual, and oral cultures and for rethinking the development of paper cultures across and beyond imperial, urban, and monolingual spheres.

The program features five invited speaker lectures, a showcase of the Benson Latin American Collection’s Treasures, a book discussion, and three panel discussions on archives, digital objects, and curatorial practices. Sessions will take place at the Institute for Historical Studies and the Benson Latin American Collection at The University of Texas at Austin.

Program (Day 1)  |  Program (Day 2)  |  Download the Abstract & Full Program
Register Here

This event is generously funded and supported by: 

• The Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School 
• The Institute for Historical Studies in the Department of History
• Littlefield Lecture
• Humanities Institute
• The Viola S. Hoffman and George W. Hoffman Lectureship in Liberal Arts and Fine Arts
• The Alice Drysdale Sheffield Endowment
• LLILAS-Benson at The University of Texas at Austin

Please share widely with your colleagues, students, and professional networks. We hope to have your company at this symposium.