NEH Selects USM Prof. Gillespie as Lecturer & Visiting Scholar for Summer Institute 2022

By: WE Staff | Thursday, 12 May 2022

Dr. Jeanne Gillespie, Co-Director of the Center for American Indian Research and Studies and Professor at The University of Southern Mississippi (USM), has been selected as a lecturer and visiting scholar for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute for higher education faculty titled "Worlds in Collision: Nahua and Spanish Pictorial Histories and Annals in 16th-Century Mexico," which will take place in Garden City, New York, from June 9.

This three-week Institute, sponsored by Adelphi University and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, will allow faculty members from across the country to explore the burgeoning new perspectives and theoretical approaches to 16th-century Mexican textual, pictorial, and ethnohistorical studies with scholars at the forefront of new critical approaches.

Dr. Gillespie is honoured to be among the distinguished visiting scholars, “I am honored that my colleagues selected me to share my research on the Tlaxcalans, the allies of Hernando Cortés and the Spaniards in the Conquest of Mexico. I will join some of the most recognized scholars in the study of Mexican Indigenous written and pictorial texts from the colonial era. I am thrilled to share my research with this diverse group of fellows who will be able to develop materials for their own scholarship and teaching.”

Dr. Gillespie will give two seminars about her research on the Tlaxcalans' narratives and pictorial texts in the conquest of Tenochtitlán. The Tlaxcalans were members of an Indigenous republic who allied with the Spanish forces under Hernán Cortés against the Triple Alliance (the Aztecs and their allies).

The first, titled "The Republic of Tlaxcala and its Colonial Legacy," will focus on her research into the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, a pictorial book that documents Indigenous participation in the war from the Gulf of Mexico to Tenochtitlán.

The second, named "Women's Voices in Colonial Tlaxcala and Beyond/ The Poetics of the Cantares mexicanos" ("Songs of Mexico"), will examine the poetics of Tlaxcalan oral texts, focusing on performance narratives with drumming notation, war reenactments, and Indigenous women's voices.

Dr. Gillespie teaches courses in Spanish language and culture, as well as American Indian Studies.

Rolena Adorno (Sterling Professor of Spanish, Yale University); Amber Brian (Director of the Latin American Studies Program, University of Iowa); Kevin Terraciano (Professor of History and Director of the Latin American Institute & Co-Chair of the Latin American Studies Graduate Program, UCLA); Lori Boornazian Diel (Professor of Art History, Texas Christian University); Dana Leibsohn (Alice Pratt Brown Professor of Art, Smith College); Barbara Mundy (Professor of Art History, Tulane University); Matthew Restall (Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Colonial Latin American History & Anthropology, Penn State University); Frances F. Berdan (Professor emerita, Anthropology, California State University, San Bernardino); and Stephanie Wood (Director and Senior Research Associate of Wired Humanities Projects, Center for Equity Promotion, College of Education, University of Oregon) are among the visiting scholars.