January 2018
2018 Shaping Up as an Extraordinary Year for Library Programming
The JCB has lined up a series of engaging events in the coming months and is excited to give you a preview. Our anchor activity is a new exhibition on “Water” that will open this spring, including an extraordinary curatorial team and a full slate of related programming – stay tuned for more information on these events. The exhibition is part of the Library’s “Four Elements” series that has explored the cultural significance of earth, air, and fire to the diverse populations of the Americas. 

On April 19, the Library looks forward to welcoming renowned Portuguese literature professor Josiah Blackmore as this year’s Vasco da Gama lecturer. Blackmore joins us from Harvard University, where he is Nancy Clark Smith Professor of the Language and Literature of Portugal and Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. He also serves as a member of the JCB’s Academic Advisory Committee. Later this spring, on May 1, the Library will host Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Charles & Mary Beard Professor of History at Rutgers University and Director of the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia to give the annual Sonia Galletti Memorial Lecture. Professor Dunbar’s latest book, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge , will be the topic of this lecture.

Finally, save the dates of May 31 – June 3 for the JCB’s triennial Jamboree, when members of the Library’s Associates and former fellows join us for a series of academic activities – including a conference exploring enslaved migrations within the Americas, in partnership with the Omohundro Institute – and other commemorative events focused around maritime and environmental history, with a special tribute planned for the late Daniel Vickers, a preeminent historian of early America.
Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies 
The JCB is thrilled to have been selected by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the Digital Library Federation (DLF) to host a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in digital curation. The fellow will engage with the Library’s world-renowned Indigenous languages collection and explore the challenges of curating culturally-sensitive materials related to the continent’s earliest inhabitants. Working with librarians, curators, Indigenous populations, research scholars, and students from a range of disciplines to better capture and manage metadata from the Library’s Latin American and Caribbean digitized cultural heritage objects, the postdoctoral fellow will consider not only the representation of native groups in historical literature, but also the way in which dictionaries, grammars, and other historical materials with Indigenous language content can be used by native communities today in projects of language documentation and revitalization. The project aims to assess how digital tools and metadata created through collaborative processes can best serve scholarly and non-scholarly communities. Scholars applied last month for the fellowship and the selection process is underway. The Library looks forward to introducing our new postdoctoral fellow in the coming months.
Meet Fellow Jaime Marroquín
Jaime Marroquín, Assistant Professor of Spanish at Western Oregon University, has embarked on a four-month Association of Friends and Fellows-supported fellowship at the JCB to research his current monograph El Peyote y la Virgen: Ethnographic History and Natural Science . Jaime is a specialist in the cultural history of Mexico and the author of Diálogos con Quetzalcóatl: humanism, etnografía y ciencia (1492-1577), published in 2014, and La history de los prejuicios en América: la Conquista , published in 2007. With former JCB fellow Ralph Bauer (University of Maryland), Jaime co-edited the forthcoming Translating Nature: a Transcultural History of Early Modern Atlantic Science (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), and it is in this vein of ethnographic history that Jaime has pursued his current research at the JCB.

El Peyote y la Virgen examines the botanical, medicinal and cultural history of the peyote cactus ( lophophora williamsii ), the yōllohxōchitl (talauma mexicana ) and the ololliuqui ( turbina corymbosa ) to analyze the (proto) ethnographic and naturalist texts and practices developed in Greater North America, particularly at the northern borders of New Spain. In the short time he has been in residence at the JCB, Marroquín already reports that he has found one of the world's richest collections on the ethnographic history of what is today northern Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. His finds have included first editions of fundamental works such as the Chronica de la provincia del Santo Evangelio de Mexico (1697) by Agustín Ventancurt, and the Chronica de la provincia de NSPS Francisco de Zacatecas (1737) by Joseph Arlegui, as well as several maps and letters that document the scientific exploration of the Americas' Northwest.
Fresh Ink: Colonial-Indigenous Language Encounters in North America and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World
Congratulations to former fellow Sean P. Harvey (Helen Watson Buckner Memorial Fellow, 2015-16) for his article, “Colonial-Indigenous Language Encounters in North America and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World”, co-authored with Sarah Rivitt and published in Early American Studies . From their earliest encounters, European colonists struggled to understand the languages spoken by indigenous peoples in the Americas and collected a vast archive of Indian language texts, including catechisms, dictionaries, vocabularies and orthographies. The authors explore scholarly work around this archive and argue that recognizing the varied forms of linguistic collision and exchange transformed ideas of language for both the indigenous peoples and the colonists, producing a new intercultural perspective on the intellectual history of early America and the Atlantic world. 
Remembering Former Fellow Osvaldo Pardo
The JCB was saddened to learn of the sudden passing of former fellow Osvaldo Pardo (Paul W. McQuillen Memorial Fellowship, 1995-96 and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2004-05), a scholar with deep expertise in Colonial Spanish American literature and culture. He was Associate Professor in the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at the University of Connecticut. His research focused on early interactions between Nahuas and European missionaries in the Central Valley of Mexico. He also was interested in the development of scientific traditions and institutions in the Spanish colonies. Pardo authored The Origins of Mexican Catholicism: Nahua Rituals and Christian Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (University of Michigan Press, 2004), and Honor and Personhood in Early Modern Mexico (University of Michigan Press, 2015).