Iberian Connections and Public Humanities — Session one, with Sarah J Pearce
Romance Languages Lounge. 82-90 Wall Street. Yale University. New Haven, CT 06511
We begin this new semester of Iberian Connections devoted to the central question of the study of the Iberian Connections and Public Humanities. We want to explore how the work we do in the academic world is not, and cannot be, disconnected from the public sphere. Maybe the public sphere, as we used to know it, has bursted into a constellation of bubbles that seem to have their own gravitational fields. We want to investigate how history, philology, the humanities, the social sciences, etc. tackle the cultural, political, and social dynamics of those bubbles and their gravitational fields, thus impacting public and political life.
Our first guest is Sarah J Pearce proposes a critical reading of Darío Fernández-Morera’s recent The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise. Beyond explaining the arguments of this specific book, which she reads with painstaking attention and expertise, Pearce delves into questions about how the humanities are always public in many different ways –including the uses of the past to support political visions.