Semesteråpning og gjesteforelesning i kulturhistorie

Knowledge of distant animals was spread, shaped, and transformed through the global circulation of not just travelers and the animals themselves, but also of printed illustrations, all of which moved in multiple directions in the early modern period. In this talk, I track some of the surprising routes of exotic animals and their images in print (in particular crocodiles and armadillos), and draw connections between the purpose and practice of copying in the early modern period and the ways that today’s generative AI sometimes “hallucinates” images based on an existing textual and visual corpus.

Lisa Voigt is a Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. She is the author of Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns (University of Texas Press, 2016) and Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), which won the Modern Language Association’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for an outstanding book in Latin American and Spanish literature and cultures. She is the Special Issues Editor of Colonial Latin American Review. This talk derives from a collaborative book project on copied travel account illustrations with Prof. Stephanie Leitch (Florida State University).