Iris Montero

Professeure à Brown University, Department of Hispanic Studies.

Thèmes de recherche

- Early modern cultures of science and medicine

- Multilingual knowledge production in the New World (Nahuatl, Spanish, Latin)

- Visual epistemologies

- Human-more than human divide through time

Travaux en cours

During my time at the CAK, I am working along two lines. Firstly, I am revising a couple of sections from my first book project, What the Hummingbird Knows: A Natural History. This book is a study on the genre of early modern natural history and its capacious quality to incorporate various forms of epistemic agency, particularly that of indigenous Nahua intellectuals. The book offers a microhistory of the hummingbird, an animal endemic to the Americas and central to many native communities along the hemisphere but absent from the Western historical record before 1492. Using the hummingbird as a tracer of knowledge making, it analyses what exactly happened when different views of nature met in the Valley of Mexico c. 1519 and how the knowledge coproduced in that context travelled and metamorphosed for three centuries. In parallel, I am starting a new project on silver and extractive rhetoric in Colonial Latin America, and hope to share some initial thoughts sparked by a monetized version of the Great Chain of Being in a sixteenth century rhetorical manual.

Éléments de bibliographie

Articles et chapitres d'ouvrages

“Paper Mirrors? Axolotl’s Scientific Itineraries in Literature and Art, and the Potential for Radical Human-More-than-human Empathy”, Global Environment, special issue on Animal Histories, forthcoming, September 2023.

“Darwin’s Hummingbird: Specimen of the Tropics” in New World Objects of Knowledge: A Cabinet of Curiosities, edited by Mark Thurner and Juan Pimentel, University of London Press, 2021.

“The Disguise of the Hummingbird: On the Natural History of Huitzilopochtli in the Florentine Codex,” Ethnohistory 67, no. 3, (2020): 429-453. *Winner of the 2021 Robert F. Heizer Award for Best Article in the field of Ethnohistory by the American Society for Ethnohistory.

“Indigenous Naturalists” in Worlds of Natural History, eds. Helen Curry, Emma Spary, James Secord and Nick Jardine, Cambridge University Press, 2018, 112-130. *Reviewed in Annals of Science and featured in Gloknos.

“The Slow Science of Swift Nature: Hummingbirds and Humans in New Spain” in Global Scientific Practice in the Age of Revolutions, 1750-1850, eds. Patrick Manning and Daniel Rood, Pittsburgh University Press, 2016, 127-146.

(with M. Aranda et al.) “The History of Atlantic Science: Collective Reflections from the 2009 Harvard Seminar on Atlantic History”, Atlantic Studies 7, no. 4 (2010): 493-509.

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