Notes
Oriol Ambrogio is a PhD candidate in history at the King’s College London, where he is preparing a thesis on missionary administration and native responses to the sacraments on the peripheries of Spanish America in the colonial period, under the supervision of Professor Francisco Bethencourt. He is interested in Jesuit missionary efforts among semi-sedentary and non-sedentary populations, focusing on how Christian rituals were perceived and reinterpreted according to the indigenous cultural traditions. He has given papers at the Institute of Latin American Studies, King’s College and Chapel Hill University seminars and at the conference of the Renaissance Society of America.
Gauvin Alexander Bailey is professor and Alfred and Isabel Bader Chair in southern baroque art at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. He has held fellowships with the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and Villa I Tatti, among others and was the 2017 Panofsky professor at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. He is also correspondent étranger of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres at the Institut de France and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His latest book is Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire: State, Church, and Society, 1604–1830 (2018).
Capucine Boidin is professor in Latin American anthropology at Sorbonne Nouvelle in the Institute of Advanced Studies in Latin America (IHEAL) and teaches Guarani language at INALCO (Langues’O). She is currently the director of IHEAL. From 2011 until 2016 she coordinated a project funded by ANR and called LANGAS (General languages from South America) (Quechua, aimara, guarani, tupi, XIX–XVI). With an open access database, this project is a pioneer in digital humanities applied to non-western languages in order to sustain anthropological history based on Amerindian manuscripts. She is writing a book called Words within History: Contribution to Guaraní Political Anthropology (XVI–XIX).
Samir Boumediene is a researcher at the Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités (Lyon). Trained in history and epistemology, he published his PhD on the history of New World medicinal plants in 2016 under the title La colonisation du savoir. He has published several articles on the history of drugs, medicine and plants. His current research deals with the notion of discovery in early modern times and with the history of questionnaires.
William Gervase Clarence-Smith was until the end of July 2019 professor of the economic history of Asia and Africa at SOAS, University of London, and editor of the Journal of Global History (Cambridge University Press). He has published on the history of various animals around the world and is currently undertaking research for a global history of mules. He has also written about the history of different missionary orders, including the Jesuits in the Philippines.
Caroline Egan is a lecturer in colonial literary and cultural studies in the Spanish and Portuguese Section at the University of Cambridge. She researches and publishes on the literatures and cultures of colonial Latin America, particularly 16th- and early 17th-century works in and about Amerindian languages and their circulation in a transatlantic context. She is currently developing a comparative project on the idea of orality in this period, including studies of the Nahuatl-language compositions collected in the Cantares Mexicanos, the lyric production of the Jesuit missionary José de Anchieta and the historiographical Comentarios reales by the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega.
Kate Ford trained as a theatre designer. Her first visit to the mission to the Chiquitos in Bolivia in 2007 was prompted by a talk by the late Jesuit musicologist, T. Frank Kennedy. She did an MA in Latin American art and architecture at the University of Essex before returning to the theatre for a year. In 2009 she began a PhD at Essex, completing it in 2014 and returning once more to theatre design. She is currently co-chair of the Anglo-Bolivian Society in London and works as a costume designer.
Barbara Ganson is professor of history and director of Caribbean and Latin American studies at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida. She completed her PhD in history at the University of Texas at Austin. With Clinia M. Saffi she translated and edited the memoirs of Antonio Ruiz de Montoya (1639), The Spiritual Conquest: Early Years of the Jesuit Missions in Paraguay (2017). She is also the author of an award-winning book, The Guaraní under Spanish Rule in the Rio de la Plata (2003).
Virginia Ghelarducci received her BA in philosophy and MA in philosophy and forms of knowledge from the University of Pisa, Italy. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Latin American Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, investigating the influence of astrology on early modern medicine, with a particular focus on colonial medicine in the Americas. Her project aims to show how the Spanish encounter with a New World, including a new natural environment and a new constellation, stimulated the observation and collection of new medicinal plants which changed the perspective on astrological medicine.
Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá is teaching associate in Portuguese studies at the University of Cambridge. She has lectured and published on early modern travel writing, especially in connection to Brazil, and on comparative studies of Brazilian, Portuguese and English literatures. Her book The Admirable Adventures and Strange Fortunes of Anthony Knivet: An English Pirate in Brazil (2015) offers a critical edition of one of the earliest English descriptions of Brazil.
Linda A. Newson is director of the Institute of Latin American Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London and emeritus professor of geography at King’s College London. She has published extensively on the demographic and cultural impact of Spanish colonial rule in the Americas and the Philippines and on the Portuguese African slave trade to Peru. Her most recent book is Making Medicines in Early Colonial Lima, Peru: Apothecaries, Science and Society (2017). She has received awards for distinguished scholarship from the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers and the Royal Geographical Society and is a fellow of the British Academy.
Eduardo L. Ortiz is emeritus professor of mathematics and of the history of mathematics at Imperial College London; visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Université d’Orleans; the Université de Rouen; a Guggenheim fellow at Harvard University; fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (Great Britain); the Royal Academy of Science (Spain); the National Academy of Science (Argentina). In 1990 he received the José Babini History of Science prize (Ministry of Science and Technology/CONICET, Argentina).
Clarissa Sanfelice Rahmeier is lecturer in humanities at the Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing, São Paulo, Brazil. She has researched the links between material culture and identity in several contexts, such as the South American missions, prehistoric and modern England and contemporary São Paulo. Publications include ‘Materiality, Social Roles and the Senses’ (Journal of Material Culture); ‘Sociedade, Corpo e Cultura’ (Opsis); ‘Land, Power and Status in Material Culture Studies’ (in An Archaeology of Land Ownership); and contributions to Landscape in the Long Durée (with Christopher Tilley and others) and Existir na Cidade (co-edited with Pedro de Santi).
Leonardo J. Waisman retired recently as a research fellow at Argentina’s CONICET. He has published on the Italian madrigal, American colonial music, performance practice, popular music of Argentina and the social significance of musical styles. He has worked extensively on the music of Jesuit missions in South America and on the operas of Vicente Martín y Soler, including a comprehensive biography. As a conductor specialising in Baroque music, he has toured America, Europe and the Far East and recorded two CDs for the Melopea label. His most recent book is Una historia de la música colonial hispanoamericana (2019).