el taller 2025 presents: Soft Power, Hard Power, and Conquest in Premodern Iberia

Dear friends and colleagues,

Please join us online on Friday, April 25th at 12:00PM for our third event of 2025, a book conversation between Seth Kimmel and Simon R. Doubleday. The event will take place online and will be moderated by Paulina León. This event is free. Please register at this link to attend.

Seth Kimmel's The Librarian's Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain (2024) and León and Galicia Under Queen Sancha and King Fernando I (2024), written by Simon Doubleday in collaboration with the late Bernard F. Reilly, are two recent books on premodern Iberia that revise traditional narratives, explore the interplay of political authority and cultural knowledge, and reconsider the spatial/conceptual ordering of the world.

Seth Kimmel is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, where he teaches the literature and culture of early modern Spain. He is the author of Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain (U. of Chicago Press, 2015) and The Librarian's Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain (U. of Chicago Press, 2024).

Simon Doubleday is Professor of Medieval History at Hofstra University, and Profesor Distinguido ‘Beatriz Galindo’ at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, author of several books, including The Wise King: A Christian Prince, Muslim Spain, and the Birth of the Renaissance (2015), which will shortly be appearing in a revised Galician edition (Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 2025).

Paulina is a Visiting Assistant Professor at New York University. Her research explores the cultural dimensions of disease and public health systems in early modern Spain and Spanish America during the seventeenth century. Her current book project, titled Writing Contagion: Cultures of Plague in the Early Modern Spanish Empire examines how early modern epidemic outbreaks transformed the purposes of literature and its circuits of production, distribution, and consumption across the Spanish empire.

Keep an eye out for more details on our upcoming events. Look out for future emails or visit wp.nyu.edu/eltaller for further information. If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected].

¡Hasta pronto!

Sandra Baena Velázquez

On behalf of the coordinating committee

Abigail Balbale
Jordana Mendelson
Sarah Pearce
Víctor Sierra Matute
Ameya Tripathi

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