Thursday, February 4, 2016 11:10-12:05 ---- MONROE 142
Irene Silverblatt on "Modern Inquisitions" She is Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Latin American Studies at Duke University, and studies how race-thinking and gender relations were integral to the making of the modern Western world, and how historical memory has shaped feelings of national belonging and demands for universal rights. These interests are both historical and contemporary, and have taken Silverblatt to the Inca Empire, the colonial Andes, and contemporary Central/Eastern Europe. She has studied the Spanish Inquisition as a modern institution, as well as the ways that gender construed power relations in Inca and Colonial Peru. Her current projects explore the ways in which historical memory plays a role in the transformation of national ideologies and transnational human rights. She is the author of Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World; Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru; and, more recently, Harvest of Blossoms: Poetry of a Life Cut Short (based on her cousin Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, who died in an SS labor camp in 1942). Event co-sponsored by Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Honors College, Religion, Jewish Studies, and Women’s Studies.