Description:

Professor Mundy is a Professor of Art History at Fordham University and a Senior Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She specializes in Latin American art with particular emphasis on indigenous art and cartography of the 16th century. Her first book, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (University of Chicago Press, 1996) was winner of the 1996 Nebenzahl Prize in the History of Cartography. Her work on cartography has continued with a co-edited volume, Painting a Map of Sixteenth-Century Mexico City: Land, Writing and Native Rule (2012), which sheds light on a rare map of Mexico City, and includes the most extensive scientific analysis of any New World manuscript to date.

Professor Mundy's interest in digital humanities resulted in a pioneering work, Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820, that was co-authored with Dana Leibsohn and funded by an N.E.H. digital development and demonstration grant (2000-03). First published in DVD format by the University of Texas Press in 2010, in 2015, it migrated online to www.vistas-visual-culture.net/.

Her lecture will discuss topics from her new book, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City (University of Texas, 2015), which centers on Tenochtitlan-Mexico City and its transformation from the sacred capital of the Aztecs into the center of Spain's overseas empire.