Nature and Society in the Iberian Worlds

In the early modern age, the Iberian Monarchies experienced an era of expansion, restless turmoil, and intricate challenges as they sought to exert control over a diverse empire as self-perceived Catholic and universal monarchies. This panel seeks papers that illustrate and discuss strategic, polemical, ideological, and utopian conceptions of nature and society in the Iberian worlds, including the Ibero-American Viceroyalties, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines, with a focus on materiality, communities, and Salvation.

The contributions may focus on images, objects, maps, and texts to address questions such as the following:

• How do these cultural productions depict and narrate ecological, territorial, and climatic transformations, including traumatic events both real and imagined?
• How do they visualize, promote, or contest authority?
• What were the ecological and biopolitical histories of those who contested ideas of social order and/or power?
• How do they address chaos, and how does the way they address chaos lead to the formation of inclusive and exclusive spaces?

Topics

Possible topics include:

• Exchange of ideas and imageries concerning nature, society, empire, and evangelization;
• (Dis)Connected (art) histories and global studies;
• Micro-histories and resistance cases of dissent, disobedience, discord;
• Movements of objects and iconographies, narratives, and ideologies;
• New paradigms of thinking about transmission, translation, and circulation;
• Early capitalism, material culture, climate imperialism;
• Transformation of models and ‘distributed agency’;
• Visions concerning natural changes and crisis, sovereignty, and authority through visual and literary representations;
• Religious, political, artistic, and literary communities, networks, and agency.

How to submit

To submit a proposal, please send a Word document to Maria Vittoria (Mavi) Spissu ([email protected]) and Marta Albalá Pelegrín ([email protected]). Please include:

• presenter’s first and last name;
• current academic affiliation (or “Independent Scholar”) and title;
• email address; paper title (15-word maximum);
• paper abstract (200-word maximum);
• short CV (300-word maximum).

Organized by Marta Albalá Pelegrín, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and Maria Vittoria Spissu, Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna.