Copied Singularities: Tracking Animal Illustrations around the Early Modern World
Lecture
Detail of animals, Ferdinand Verbiest, A Complete Map of the World, 1674
This lecture, part of the Zurbarán Centre Research Seminar series with ARTES, will feature Lisa Voigt, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University.
Knowledge of distant animals was spread, shaped, and transformed through the global circulation of not just travelers and the animals themselves, but also of printed illustrations, all of which moved in multiple directions in the early modern period. In this talk, Voigt will track some of the surprising routes of exotic animals and their images in print (in particular crocodiles and armadillos), and draw connections between the purpose and practice of copying in the early modern period and the ways that Artificial Intelligence generates and sometimes “hallucinates” images based on an existing textual and visual corpus.
Lisa Voigt
Lisa Voigt is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. She is the author of Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns (University of Texas Press, 2016) and Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), which won the Modern Language Association’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for an outstanding book in Latin American and Spanish literature and cultures.
She is Special Issues Editor of Colonial Latin American Review, and her co-edited special issue on Mapping the Rituals of the Portuguese Empire is forthcoming from Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies this spring. This talk derives from a collaborative book project on copied travel account illustrations with Prof. Stephanie Leitch (Florida State University).
Research Seminar Series
The event is part of the Research Seminar Series organized by Durham University’s Zurbarán Centre with the ARTES Iberian and Latin American Visual Culture Group in collaboration with the Instituto Cervantes and the Embassy of Spain in London. The series provides an open forum for engaging with innovative research and exhibition projects relating to the visual arts in the Hispanic world.
Free online lecture on Zoom at 6:00 pm, UK time.