Allison Bigelow
Tom Scully Discovery Chair Associate Professor of Spanish
Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese, University of Virginia
** Seminar: October 30, 2020: “Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World”
Project Summary
I am beginning a new project at IHGC, one that builds from the methods that I developed in my first book, Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture for the University of North Carolina Press, May 2020). My new project turns from mining to agriculture, another critical vernacular science and a root paradigm of settler colonialism. In what I am tentatively titling Women of Corn, Men of Corn: The Meanings of Maize Agriculture in the Early Americas, I will compare agricultural technologies and the techniques of maize cultivation in two regions of the hemisphere, Mayan-speaking Mesoamerica, where men grew crops, and the Algonquin-speaking Chesapeake, where women took charge of farming. This framework of similarity and difference will allow me to analyze how gender influenced agricultural life, and how agricultural patterns shaped gender systems, before and after the European invasion.
Biography
Allison Bigelow is the Tom Scully Discovery Chair Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. She is the author of Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture for UNC Press, 2020), the first book-length study of the technical and scientific vocabularies that miners developed in early modern Iberian colonies. Her research on Indigenous knowledge production, gender systems, and colonial science has been funded by the NEH, ACLS, and Huntington Library, and it is published in journals like Anuario de estudios bolivianos, Early American Literature, Early American Studies, Ethnohistory, Journal of Extractive Industries and Societies, and PMLA. With Rafael Alvarado (https://datascience.virginia.edu/people/rafael-alvarado) she is the co-PI of the UVA Multepal Project, a scholarly and pedagogical initiative in digital Mesoamerican studies. Multepal's current focus is to prepare digital critical editions of the sacred book of the Maya K'iche', Popol Wuj (https://multepal.github.io/popolwuj/). At IHGC, Allison is beginning a new project, tentatively titled Women of Corn, Men of Corn: The Meanings of Maize Agriculture in the Early Americas, which will compare agricultural technologies in two regions of the Americas: Mesoamerica, where men grew crops, and the Chesapeake, where women took charge of farming.
