Surekha Davies
Substack newsletter: https://surekhadavies.substack.com/
Website: surekhadavies.org
I am a historian of science, art, and ideas. My first book, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge University Press, 2016; pbk 2017) won the 2016 Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history, awarded by the Journal of the History of Ideas, and the Roland H. Bainton Prize in History, awarded by the Sixteenth-Century Society & Conference. It was a Finalist for the Pickstone Prize for the best scholarly book in the history of science, awarded by the British Society for the History of Science.
I am currently writing Humans: A Monstrous History (under contract as a lead trade-list/crossover title with the University of California Press).
My research interests include visual and material culture, encounters in the Americas, environmental history, cartography, monsters, and the history of mentalities from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. I have worked on aspects of French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, German and Dutch responses to new worlds. I am currently a long-term fellow at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. I was formerly an assistant professor at Western Connecticut State University, where I was awarded tenure and promotion to associate professor in 2018. During my dissertation research, i was a curator at the British Library Map Library. My research has been supported by the Newberry Library, the American Philosophical Society, the John Carter Brown Library, the American Historical Association the Library of Congress, the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Leverhulme Trust.
Supervisors: Examiner: Joan-Pau Rubiés, Examiner: Jean Michel Massing, Supervisor: Elizabeth McGrath, and Supervisor: Jill Kraye
Website: surekhadavies.org
I am a historian of science, art, and ideas. My first book, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge University Press, 2016; pbk 2017) won the 2016 Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history, awarded by the Journal of the History of Ideas, and the Roland H. Bainton Prize in History, awarded by the Sixteenth-Century Society & Conference. It was a Finalist for the Pickstone Prize for the best scholarly book in the history of science, awarded by the British Society for the History of Science.
I am currently writing Humans: A Monstrous History (under contract as a lead trade-list/crossover title with the University of California Press).
My research interests include visual and material culture, encounters in the Americas, environmental history, cartography, monsters, and the history of mentalities from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. I have worked on aspects of French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, German and Dutch responses to new worlds. I am currently a long-term fellow at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. I was formerly an assistant professor at Western Connecticut State University, where I was awarded tenure and promotion to associate professor in 2018. During my dissertation research, i was a curator at the British Library Map Library. My research has been supported by the Newberry Library, the American Philosophical Society, the John Carter Brown Library, the American Historical Association the Library of Congress, the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Leverhulme Trust.
Supervisors: Examiner: Joan-Pau Rubiés, Examiner: Jean Michel Massing, Supervisor: Elizabeth McGrath, and Supervisor: Jill Kraye
less
InterestsView All (47)
Uploads
Books by Surekha Davies
Book Announcements by Surekha Davies
Articles & Chapters by Surekha Davies
and the relationship between experience and mental frameworks.
Book reviews of Renaissance Ethnography by Surekha Davies
Currently in 'Articles in Press' section of Journal of Historical Geography
Interviews and podcasts by Surekha Davies
Talks by Surekha Davies
and the relationship between experience and mental frameworks.
Currently in 'Articles in Press' section of Journal of Historical Geography
These discussions of headless men and Amazons prompt us to ask why Ralegh and Cecil would have included them in a work conceived to authenticate claims about a gold-rich empire whose riches had yet to be unearthed. In this paper I shall interrogate the work that these spectacular claims performed, and how and why Ralegh and Cecil might have expected them to perform it. I then analyse the reception of the concept of headless people among the first artisans to illustrate them: the Amsterdam mapmakers of the workshop of Jodocus Hondius the Elder. The varied attempts to evaluate, understand and illustrate these beings reflect broader concerns over how to evaluate testimony about wonders in distant lands, and how those who have not witnessed a wonder might nonetheless participate in making knowledge about it. Comparing the strategies of Ralegh, Cecil and Hondius for producing reliable knowledge about wonders while preserving – even enhancing – their own reputations prompts us to re-think the relationship between wonders and credibility in the Renaissance.
This paper traces responses to two monstrous tropes that appeared frequently on maps of the Americas: the Brazilan cannibal and the Patagonian giant. It shows how the visual code of the map, as interpreted by such authors as Jean de Léry, Thomas Blundeville and Ulisse Aldrovandi, transformed scattered, even anecdotal, ethnographic information in travel accounts into general laws about the inhabitants of particular regions. It argues that the panoptic rhetoric of maps privileged those commentators who could synthesize multiple sources and geographical, ethnographical and other discourses over individuals who had witnessed phenomena first-hand. Finally, it suggests that the changing iconography of the Patagonian giant c.1525-1580 was
symptomatic of prevailing uncertainty about the ontology of the
Patagonians, a debate within which the conventions on interpreting map illustration led viewers to perceive the Patagonians as a monstrous people.
These iconographies lent particular weight to the arguments of apologists for the Amerindians, such as Bartolomé de Las Casas. Two of the publishers of Dutch translations of Las Casas Brevíssima relación – a catalogue of Spanish misdeeds in the Indies arranged by region in the order in which they were perpetrated – also printed maps. One of these publishers was Cornelis Claesz, an influential and prolific printer of maps with innovative iconographies. Claesz’s decision to produce eight editions of the text in various forms – prose with learned quotations, engravings with captions, and verse – shows one of the most prolific publishers of maps depicting Amerindians participating in contemporary debates at the intersection of ethnology and imperialism.
This paper argues that the notion of the inhabitants of Brazil as
cannibals owed more to Martin Waldseemüller, who synthesized
circum-Caribbean travel writing, maps and classical scholarship, than
to such travellers as Columbus, Vespucci, André Thevet or Jean de
Léry. Neither the fact that these peoples were emblematized by
cannibalism nor the precise practices associated with them was
inevitable given the available sources. Maps drawing on the Carta
Marina influenced cosmographies and prints to such an extent that
cannibals came to personify the Americas as a whole.
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
This series is dedicated to the study of cultural constructions of difference, abnormality, the monstrous, and the marvelous from multiple disciplinary perspectives, including the history of science and medicine, literary studies, the history of art and architecture, philosophy, gender studies, disability studies, critical race studies, ecocriticism, and other forms of critical theory. Single-author volumes and collections of original essays that cross disciplinary boundaries are particularly welcome. The editors seek proposals on a wide range of topics, including, but not limited to: the aesthetics of the grotesque; political uses of the rhetoric or imagery of monstrosity; theological, social, and literary approaches to witches and the demonic in their broader cultural context; the global geography of the monstrous, particularly in relation to early modern colonialism; the role of the monstrous in the history of concepts of race; the connections between gender and sexual normativity and discourses of monstrosity; juridical and other legal notions of the monstrous; the history of teratology; technologies that mimic life such as automata; wild men; hybrids (human/animal; man/machine); and concepts of the natural and the normal.