Speaker
Nydia Pineda de Ávila
Title
"Stars Down to Earth: A screening of American Skies"
Abstract
American Skies is an international project that explores filmmaking as a narrative and research tool for the history of science. Between 2020 and 2023, it produced 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. The project, produced with low-cost technology during pandemic times, was born as a collective response to the constraints of standard academic research and communication formats that became even more acute with the dynamics of isolation. It connects personal archives, historical documents, historiographical debates, and multi-sensorial juxtapositions in personal narratives. This screening is a meditation on images, rituals, and artifacts that embody celestial knowledge and beliefs in early modern Europe and 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.
Cost: FREE
Janet Hundrieser
(847) 491-3525
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