Description:

Please join us for the second lecture in the 2019-2020 Latin America Imagined series.

In this talk, Stella Nair of UCLA will examine some of the gendered paradigms that Iberians brought to the Andes in the early modern period and have come to define how we see Inca architecture today. In doing so, Nair will also explore some of the surviving clues into the ways in which women gave meaning to Inca architecture and space.

Stella Nair is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at UCLA. She is also Core Faculty in the Archaeology Interdepartmental Program and the Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies at UCLA. In addition, Nair is Affiliated Faculty with the American Indian Studies Center, the American Indian Studies Interdepartmental Program, and the Latin American Institute.

Nair’s scholarship focuses on the built environment of indigenous communities in the Americas and is shaped by her interests in construction technology, spatial theory, material culture studies, landscape transformations, cross-cultural exchange, and hemispheric networks. Trained as an architect and architectural historian, Nair has conducted fieldwork in Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, and the United States, with ongoing projects in the South Central Andes.

Nair’s publications explore a range of subjects and regions such as colonial Andean paintings, Tiahuanaco lithic technology, the design of Inca royal estates, eighteenth century woven roofs, and Brazilian urbanism. Nair’s current book project, “Shelter, Shrine, and Prison: The Acllauasi and Other Spaces for Women in the Inca Empire,” will be the first in-depth study of the acllauasi (“house of the chosen women”) and of female space in the Inca Empire. Nair’s previous book, At Home with the Sapa Inca: Architecture, Space, and Legacy at Chinchero (University of Texas, 2015), examines the sophisticated ways in which the Inca manipulated space and architecture to impose their authority. Nair has also published (with Jean-Pierre Protzen) a book titled The Stones of Tiahuanaco: A Study of Architecture and Construction (Cotsen, 2013), which explores one of the world’s most artful and sophisticated carving traditions. Nair’s article “Localizing Sacredness, Difference, and Yachacuscamcani in a Colonial Andean Painting” was honored by its selection as one of 32 ‘greatest hits’ articles published in the last hundred years of the Art Bulletin.

Nair has co-founded two interdisciplinary groups at UCLA: the Andean Working Group with Dr. Chip Stanish in the Department of Anthropology, which brings together Andean specialists in the greater Los Angeles region to share research; and the Indigenous Material and Visual Culture Reading Group with Dr. Kevin Terraciano in the Department of History, which brings together students and faculty across campus who work on indigenous material culture A.D 1450-1850. In addition to directing the Andean Laboratory, Nair is developing an Architecture laboratory at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, which focuses on architectural field methods, materials, construction, and preservation.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Art History.