Nicolas Wey-Gomez's Research
Professor Wey Gómez studies the history of exploration, empire, and globalization. He specializes in the early modern Atlantic world, combining the field of literature with history of science and technology and intellectual history. His research and teaching are aimed at expanding present understandings of work across disciplines, as well as of the knowledge systems that inform a broad range of texts from antiquity to the early modern period.
Wey Gómez's work on the Atlantic examines the presuppositions underlying the letters, chronicles, histories and cosmographies that document Europe's encounter with the Americas in the wake of Columbus's discoveries. He focuses on early portrayals of native peoples by Europeans, particularly on the role that scientific and technical knowledge played in the production of New World anthropology and in early legal justifications for European expansionism around the globe. However, he is also more broadly interested in the treatment of all sorts of “outsiders” in Hispanic letters from the beginning of the early modern period in Spain to the end of the colonial era in the Americas.
His research on these subjects attempts to observe the questions, constraints, and methodologies governing a broad range of disciplines today – among them, classics, cultural anthropology, critical geography, history of science and technology, intellectual history, literature, and philosophy. It also seeks to describe the logic connecting a broad range of late medieval and early modern knowledge domains that no longer exist or whose ties to each other are no longer self-evident. In this line of work, Wey Gómez has ultimately sought to outline the complex epistemic system that underwrote imperialism as theory and practice in early modernity.
Wey Gómez's first book, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies, appeared in the series Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology edited by Jed Z. Buchwald for The MIT Press in 2008. This book aims at redefining the geographical history of the discovery of the Americas as part of Mediterranean Europe’s problematic reawakening to the natural and human resources of the belt of the tropics.
He is currently working on two books. His first book, The Machine of the World: Science and Human Rights in the Age of Empire, studies the interrelated developments of natural history, anthropology, and humanitarian advocacy in the early modern Hispanic world. His essays on this topic include “The Politics of Light: Al-Kindī’s Optics and the Vindication of the American Tropics in Bartolomé de las Casas’s Apologética historia sumaria (1527-1561)” and "Aristotle and the American Tropics: The Politics of Place in Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo's Sumario de la natural historia de las Indias (1526)." He is also preparing a general history of imperialism in the Age of Exploration titled Latitude: How Europe Invented the Global South.
Last updated: January 07, 2013 11:29
