Description:

Speaker

Nydia Pineda de Ávila, History - UC San Diego

Title

"Filmmaking as Method for the History of Science: A screening and discussion of “American Skies"

Abstract

“American Skies” is a series of eight video-essays by scholars in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Italy, and the U.S. who explore their relationship with the multi-faceted meanings of the heavens in colonial and postcolonial Latin America.

Biography

Professor Pineda de Ávila works at the intersection of the history of science, the history of the book and art history in early modern Europe and the Americas. In 2018, she completed a PhD in English at Queen Mary, University of London, with a dissertation on maps of the moon as objects of prestige and commodities made through interactions between natural philosophers, cosmographers, astronomers, humanists, intelligencers, artists, and publishers in seventeenth-century Europe. During her postdoc at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, she began researching the material and political aspects of celestial images in the colonial Americas. She is currently completing book manuscript that reveals the changing values of moon maps as visual experiments, rhetorical artefacts and commodities from the early phases of the development of the telescope in European observatories, workshops, courts and shops, through to the intellectual and political settings of the Americas in the late eighteenth century.