Wednesday, February 26, 2025
12:00 - 1:30 p.m.
Kim Koo Library (328)111 Thayer St
Please register in advance on the Events@Brown event listing. Lunch will be provided for registered attendees.
About the Event
In this talk, Dr. Elizabeth Penry explore's the little studied yet rich world of what Indigenous Andeans made of Renaissance ideals. Dr. Penry challenges the assumption that Renaissance was a singular phenomenon limited to Europe and understand it instead as a global movement of ideas. These ideas, carried globally by the Society of Jesus, the first religious order to take education as its mandate, included Mediterranean notions of rights and sovereignty grounded in ideas of civic humanism that became standard components of Jesuit pedagogy. Through Jesuit education and missionary activity in key sites like Juli and Potosí, Andeans gained Spanish language literacy and used it to navigate the colonial legal system, advocate for their rights, and challenge colonial hierarchies. Jesuits served a dual role as both enforcers of colonial order and, perhaps, inadvertent facilitators of Indigenous questioning of colonial domination, as their teaching of Renaissance civic humanism resonated with Andean concepts of reciprocity. Drawing on archival materials from Europe and the Americas, Dr. Penry highlights how Indigenous Andeans—commoners and elites alike—refashioned Jesuit teachings to assert autonomy, negotiate power, and reimagine their communities.
About the Speaker
Dr. S. Elizabeth Penry is a prize-winning historian of the colonial Andes and of Early Modern Spain. Her book, The People are King: The Making of an Indigenous Andean Politics (OUP, 2019), won the Howard Cline Prize for Ethnohistory from the Conference on Latin American History, the Flora Tristán Prize for the best book on Peru from the Latin American Studies Association, and the Best First Book from the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, among others. An Associate Professor of History at Fordham University (New York) and former Director of Fordham University’s Institute for Latin American and Latinx Studies, Dr. Penry’s work has been supported by the American Philosophical Society, Fulbright, a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. She currently serves on the board of the Renaissance Society of America. During 2024-2025, Dr. Penry is a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library. Her current research focuses on Spanish language literacy of Indigenous Andeans, and what they made of Renaissance ideas, introduced in part through their contact with Jesuit founded missions, schools and confraternities in the Viceroyalty of Peru.
About the Series
Graduate students and faculty affiliated with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies are invited to present their work at this roundtable luncheon series. Faculty and graduate student research presentations will alternate on a biweekly basis. All are welcome.