Please join us for an afternoon to mark the release of edited volumes that staff have produced since 2021. While the department often holds book launches, we do not often acknowledge our contribution to shaping the field through intellectual leadership and collaboration. The event will showcase eight such publications, which have helped to start diverse new research conversations and map out new fields. 

Enjoy the 3rd Floor Terrace in FAB at 5pm for drinks and nibbles following the event -- a rare opportunity for us to use this space (we hope the weather will cooperate).

All welcome!

Ben Clarke is an associate professor specializing in British literature after 1900 and critical theory. He has particular interests in working-class writing, cultural studies, and the literature of the nineteen-thirties. He is the author of Orwell in Context: Communities, Myths, Values (Palgrave, 2007), co-author, with Michael Bailey and John K. Walton, of Understanding Richard Hoggart: A Pedagogy of Hope (Blackwell, 2012), and co-editor, with Nick Hubble, of Working-Class Writing: Theory and Practice (Palgrave, 2018).

The Defeat of Atabalipa in Three 16^th Century French Maps

Carolina Martínez (CONICET-Universidad Nacional de San Martín/Universidad de Buenos Aires) 

The Spanish conquest of Peru, conducted by Francisco Pizzarro around 1532, led to the publication of numerous texts in which the Spanish “exploits” and the defeat of Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, were narrated. The accounts, written by those who had witnessed the Spanish feat and published within the realms of the Spanish monarchy, were soon translated into different languages and printed across Europe, reaching widespread circulation in the next couple of decades. As a consequence of the descriptions present in these texts, the historical figure of Atahualpa became of interest to both readers and publishers. In the second half of the 16^th century, his clothes were illustrated in costume books (Boissard, 1581; Bruyn, 1581), his portrait and life were included in André Thevet’s Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres grecz, latins et payens (1584), and his murder at the hands of Pizarro became a topic of choice to illustrate the region of Peru among some mapmakers of the Norman “school” of cartography. By examining the representations of the “Kingdom of Peru” in the world map made by Pierre Desceliers towards 1550 and in Guillaume Le Testu’s 1556 Cosmographie Universelle, this presentation will focus on the process by which the death of Atahualpa was transposed from a literary genre into a cartographic image. Special attention will be paid to the map of Peru published in the anonymous Histoire de la Terre neuve du Péru en l'Inde occidentale in Paris in 1545.

The seminar will take place in FAB3.31. Refreshments will be served after the talk.

Dr. Carolina Martínez (UBA/UNSAM), will speak to us on 'The Defeat of Atabalipa in Three Sixteenth-Century French Maps'. This is an in-person event in FAB3.31