Margaret R. Ewalt
Margaret R. Ewalt, Associate Professor of Spanish, has been teaching at Wake Forest University since 2001. She received her B.A. from Colby College, Maine and her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Her teaching, research, and publication interests include the Enlightenment in Spain and Spanish America, Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Latin American Literature, and Colonial Spanish American Literature. She is the author of _Peripheral Wonders: Nature, Knowledge, and Enlightenment in the Eighteenth-Century Orinoco_ (Bucknell University Press, 2008) and several articles on trans-Atlantic eighteenth-century natural history writing.
Her current book project is tentatively titled _Francis Bacon in Hispanic Science: Knowledge, the Nature of Modernity, and the Spanish World, 1539-1782_. “Modernity†is the focus of many studies on the 19th- and 20th century Spanish world. Less attention has been paid to Hispanic modernity during the 16th-18th centuries. This book studies Francis Bacon’s debts to the Spanish Jesuit José de Acosta and reveals ways that writers born in Spain and the Spanish viceroyalties opened learned Northern European discourse to non-European knowledge paradigms through their articulations of Baconianism. It challenges a myth of modernity that assigns the Spanish world a marginal role in the cultural history of western science and contributes to the humanities by documenting and interpreting a number of previously unidentified reciprocities of knowledge production during the 16th-18th centuries that upend Eurocentric claims about “scientific universality†and legitimate sources of knowledge, which continue to shape intercultural relations into the present day.
0 comments:
Post a Comment