HAA Lecture Series- “Inheriting the Pacific: Can Art History Think an Ocean?”

The Pacific Ocean: frontier, boundary, haven, threat, lure. Across the early modern period, as colonial projects took root in the Americas and Asia, the Pacific became integral to global trade in art and commodities. Yet this geography was more than a site of transit. The Pacific fostered new habits of thinking about the limits of knowledge, cultural differences, and the alienability of objects, people, and their land. How this ocean once mattered— to those who called the ocean home or foreigners passing through—is not the reason it matters today. Or is it? With this question as anchor, this talk considers the ways colonial histories of the Pacific remain bound to current thinking about art and its global geographies. Professor Leibsohn’s current research taps the insights of anthropology and art history, focusing on both indigenous visual culture in colonial Latin America and trans-Pacific trade in the early modern period. She has published on indigenous maps and manuscripts, hybridity in colonial visual culture, the trade between China and Mexico, and the early modern history of Manila. Leibsohn teaches courses on Latin American visual culture and histories of colonialism and early modern exchange at Smith College. She also has a strong interest in digital technologies and team-teaches the interdisciplinary classes Digital Effects and Making Knowledge. Her online collaborative publications include Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820 and History from Things: Indigenous Objects and Colonial Latin America. Leibsohn is also a member of Smith's Latin American and Latino/a Studies Program and serves as the editor of special issues for the interdisciplinary journal Colonial Latin American Review. Free and open to the public.