Dr Stephanie Rohner

Stephanie Rohner holds an MA, MPhil, and PhD in Spanish from Yale University. Her area of specialization is the literature and culture of Colonial Latin America with a particular interest in the transatlantic circulation of indigenous literary, historiographical, and visual discourses. One of the questions that drive her research concerns how modern ideas about the pre-Columbian past in Latin America have been formed. She looks at the eighteenth century as a key moment in which innovative approaches such as the exploration of archeological sites and the explosion of antiquarian studies in dialogue with the philosophical and scientific trends of the European Enlightenment deeply renewed understandings of indigenous histories and material cultures. In her current book project, she focuses on the efforts of the eighteenth-century Mexican Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavigero to compile the pre-Columbian history of Mexico and to systematize native epistemologies from his exile in Italy. This project conceptualizes Clavigero’s Historia antigua de México (1780-1781) as a discursive “museum” through which he offered an original defence of the study of Mexican antiquities, particularly indigenous pictorial and alphabetic texts, and Mesoamerican material culture. Her research has been supported by awards from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.