Monday, Oct 23, 2023
5:30PM to 7:30PM
Humanities Quadrangle 276
Book Night with Miguel Valerio’s new, award-winning book Sovereign Joy (Cambridge University Press, 2022) in conversation with Lindsay Stern and Lisa Voigt.
We asked our interlocutors to prepare some notes and glosses for us, to help jumpstart our conversation. These are linked below to our partner seminar, Iberian Connections.
Miguel A. Valerio is assistant professor of Spanish at Washington University in St. Louis. Prof. Valerio is a scholar of the African diaspora in the Iberian world. His research has focused on black Catholic brotherhoods or confraternities and Afro-creole festive practices in colonial Latin America, especially Mexico and Brazil. He is the author of Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and a co-editor of Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status through Religious Practices (Amsterdam University Press, 2022). He is currently working on his second book project, Architects of Their World: The Artistic and Ritualistic Spaces of Afro-Brazilian Brotherhoods (under contract with Cambridge University Press). His research has appeared in various academic journals, including Slavery and Abolition, Colonial Latin American Review, The Americas, the Journal of Festive Studies, and Latin American Research Review.
Lindsay O’Connor Stern is a '23-24 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. She completed a PhD in Comparative Literature at Yale in 2023. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in New Literary History, Law & Critique, and Smithsonian Magazine. She is the author of a novella, Town of Shadows (Scrambler Books 2012), about a rug doctor living in a dictatorship, and a novel, the The Study of Animal Languages (Viking, 2019), which received the Iowa Writers’ Workshop's Taylor-Chehak Prize in Fiction.
This series is inspired by the spirit of Sheherazade, Dhuoda, Christine de Pizan, Teresa de Cartagena, the pequeñas mujeres rojas and so many others for whom the practice of literature—in many of its facets—was the matter of survival. They existed in circumstances of physical and sexual violence, of civil war, of racial discrimination, of isolation; they also lived in circumstances that cannot be properly expressed outside their own experiments with literature.
Our guests write from many directions, for many audiences, for many souls. Novels, reviews, the lives of afrodescendent people, dance, race, sexual violences, asylum briefs, and so many other forms of polyhedric writing that explore the limits of literature—and those of survival. They will be in conversation about their work, about their thought and, certainly, about the joys and frustrations of the literary worlds they inhabit. To see our full Fall schedule, please visit our Iberian Nights page..