Can Libraries Control the World?

The American Library in Paris, the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, and the Columbia Global Paris Center will host at The American Library in Paris a conversation between Professor Seth Kimmel and Lauren Robertson, Kimmel analyzes how the model of a library was used as a tool of Spanish colonialism.

In The Librarian’s Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain, Seth Kimmel investigates how the model of the library became the basis for Spain’s organization of its growing empire. As Spain sought to expand its dominance in the Americas, the world became a reflection of Spanish and Moroccan library science. Seth Kimmel is a professor of Latin American and Iberian Studies at Columbia University who studies the medieval and early modern period of the Iberian peninsula. This event will be moderated by Lauren Robertson, scholar and current fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris.

Seth Kimmel is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, where he teaches the literature and culture of early modern Spain. He is the author of two books, both published by the University of Chicago Press: The Librarian’s Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain and Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain.

Lauren Robertson is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she works on early modern literature and culture. She is the author of Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater: Stage Spectacle and Audience Response, and her recent essays appear in Shakespeare Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, and Theatre Journal. She is currently a fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, where she is at work on her next book project, an account of the shared aesthetics of race-making and classical revival in the English Renaissance.