Upcoming events.
EIHS Lecture: The Nature of Spanish Empire
When Spain sought dominion over vast early modern landscapes—from islands to highlands, deserts to rainforests—it faced a crisis of knowledge. To transform diverse natures into imperial wealth, the court launched the relaciones geográficas, questionnaires designed to impose informational order. Yet local informants proved unruly. They both learned the imperial vernacular and embedded their own agendas within responses, destabilizing Spanish categories. Challenging simplistic binaries of success and failure, this lecture reveals how attempts to govern nature sparked dialectics of authority and resistance, drawing on insights from Knowing an Empire: Early Modern Chinese and Spanish Worlds in Dialogue (Lever, 2025).
Mackenzie Cooley is a historian of nature’s entanglement with power. A scholar of early modern Italy, Spain, and the Spanish Empire, her first book, The Perfection of Nature (2022), reveals how Renaissance breeding shaped ideas of race, human potential, and dominion over animals. She co-edited the books "Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds" (2023) and "Knowing an Empire: Early Modern Chinese and Spanish Worlds in Dialogue" (2025). She leads Historical Pharmacopeias, a digital humanities project mapping the evolution of medical knowledge across cultures. She is an associate professor at Hamilton College, and a 2025 winner of the Dan David Prize.
This event presented by the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.
More info: https://lsa.umich.edu/history/news-events/all-events.detail.html/136094-21877841.html
The Pharmacopeia That Wasn’t: The Hernández Expedition and Spanish-American Natural Products
A talk at the Atlantic History at NYU.
The Atlantic History Workshop at NYU, established in 1997, is a forum for the exchange of ideas among scholars of the humanities and social sciences with interests in the history of Atlantic currents and connections. Organized as a space for collaborative study, the workshop sponsors regular sessions during the academic year to discuss works in progress by both junior and senior researchers. Papers are circulated in advance, and all sessions are open to both members of the Atlantic world history program of the NYU History Department and the wider scholarly community.
Atlantic history encompasses research on Africa, the Americas, and Europe; comparative analysis of Atlantic historical processes; and histories of any of the subregions of the Atlantic world. Workshop participants have addressed such themes as Atlantic diasporas, slavery and resistance, settler colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty, cross-regional political and religious movements, literature and language, gender and sexuality, social life and culture, histories of science, technology, and the environment, Atlantic trade, and Atlantic empires and revolutions, with an emphasis on the period between 1500 and 1900. As we seek to build new forms of community and creativity, the NYU Atlantic Workshop welcomes discussion of all relevant topics and theoretical perspectives within the field and especially encourages conversation about new approaches.
For more information about the Atlantic world history program of the NYU History Department, see http://history.as.nyu.edu. For more information about the Atlantic History Workshop, please contact the workshop director or graduate student coordinator. For upcoming sessions, click the schedule link above.
The workshop meets on several Tuesdays per month from 12:30pm to 2:00pm on the 6th floor of the King Juan Carlos Center (53 Washington Square South), Room 607.
Workshop Director: Dr. Nicole Eustace (nicole.eustace@nyu.edu)
Workshop Coordinator: Sam Wagner (samantha.wagner@nyu.edu)
The Trouble with Simples: A Professor’s Unfinished Pharmacopeia in Enlightenment Venice
While contemporaries worried about the health and wealth of nations, the Enlightenment polymath Professor Simone Stratico (1733-1824) sought to make a uniquely Venetian pharmacopeia—an official list of medicinal drugs—specifically tailored to the health of La Serenissima. According to Stratico and his academic collaborators, the canals that had once transported the spices at the center of the medieval and early modern medical trade had become saturated with local apothecaries who had reputations for price gauging, quackery, and even heresy. Using the late eighteenth-century manuscript collection “Studies for a Venetian Pharmacopeia” from the Biblioteca Marciana, this talk follows Stratico’s attempt to welcome university experts in medicine, surgery, and chemistry to the process of creating a standardized list of Venetian drugs. In so doing, Stratico, born into the Venetian empire, whittled down the world’s pharmacological wonders to a medical vocabulary for it, including natural products with plant, animal, or mineral origins. However, the process was more challenging than he thought. What, after all, was the medically useful part of a plant? How might, say, a stem, be standardized and measured either by volume or potency? The deeper Stratico looked, the more befuddling the quagmire of uncertainty. Through Stratico’s extensive unpublished writing and editorial choices, this talk will parse the challenges of an eighteenth-century moment focused on standardization, the intertwining of natural history and drug discovery, and the use of symbols to represent substances.
New Worlds of Drug Discovery: Path Dependency in the Early Modern Atlantic Pharmacopeia
https://phytochemtalks.github.io/
A virtual seminar series for the phytochemistry community.
Talks at 12pm EST every other Friday.
Organized by: Lucas Busta (University of Minnesota-Duluth, USA), Lars Kruse (University of British Columbia, Canada), Gaurav Moghe (Cornell University, USA)
New World Nature Symposium
Undergraduate Student researchers Lara Barreira, Andrew Hohmann, Simon Le, and Cole Wassiliew present their findings as part of the New World Nature Research group.
The talk takes place in KJ 125 at Hamilton College.