CMEMS: Eduardo Acosta (Stanford, SHC Fellow)

Organized and hosted by the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (CMEMS).

Eduardo Acosta (Stanford, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, SHC) will give a talk titled "Medieval Landscapes: Nature and Periodization in Early Modern Bengal."

Closely reading together maps, journal articles, hydrogeological surveys and travel diaries, this talk will focus on the problems of 'reading history' in the landscape of early colonial Bengal, and how these heuristic issues reveal and pose questions to the coining and understanding of global historical time and its periodization. The colonial endeavor to know the history of the meandering rivers of Bengal did not stem from administrative and revenue imperatives only, but it became another site in which the engagement with Bengal's past was coded in a teleological narrative in which landscape also reflected the 'natural' decay of the 'medieval.'

The CMEMS Workshop series meets most Wednesdays during the academic year. See the CMEMS website for the list of upcoming speakers.