Lecture by Dana Leibsohn
"After the Swarm: Colonizing Wax in the Spanish Americas"
Join the Religious Studies Department for a lecture by Dana Leibsohn at 4:30pm in the Library Lecture Room, "After the Swarm: Colonizing Wax in the Spanish Americas".
In the colonial, Catholic world, wax was not quite as important as food and water, but almost. Focusing on wax collected in the Philippines and shipped across the Pacific Ocean to the Americas, this presentation asks two questions. How did bees, forests, and wax become colonial subjects in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? And how can viscosity, scent, and malleability refigure thinking about colonial environments and their histories?
Reception at 4:00pm, Lecture at 4:30pm. This event is free and open to the public. Visitors may access Clapp Library via the main entrance from 8:30am-4:30pm. Light refreshments will be served. Kindly RSVP by Tuesday, November 3rd.
About the speaker:
Dana Leibsohn is the Alice Pratt Brown Professor of Art at Smith College. Her research addresses colonialism and visual culture in the early modern Americas and Pacific world. Along with single-authored publications on Indigenous manuscript painting, the trade between China and Mexico, and cartography in Manila, she co-directed the project, “Pacific America” (Terra Foundation) and has co-authored essays on hybridity and visual culture, subaltern fidelity, and the materiality of colonial paper. The ACLS, Andrew Mellon Foundation, and National Endowment for the Humanities have supported her research. Currently she is General Editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Colonial Latin American Review.
For event questions, please email Margaret Kennedy at mk110@wellesley.edu.
For accessibility questions, please email accessibility@wellesley.edu.