Welcome to MEMIC: an interdisciplinary research group dedicated to Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Studies. At the core of our research group are two questions: the materialities of texts and images and the entanglements of cultures that came into contact in the Iberian worlds. Research questions cluster around translation and circulation, religion, race, gender and the world-making capacity of images and texts. Methodologically, we engage with book history, literary theory, connected history, translation studies, and conceptual history.
The main activity of MEMIC is our annual calendar of events. We also organize conference panels, interviews, and workshops that nourish an ongoing debate about how our contemporary world addresses and redefines in the present the past of the Portuguese and Spanish cultures. Our goal is to create through our academic conversations an interdisciplinary landscape that informs of the main challenges and questions of our fields of study.
Among MEMIC members, there are participants affiliated with Boston University, Columbia University, CHAM, The University of Chicago, Stanford University, UCLA, Cal Poly Pomona and Villanova University. We welcome any scholars of the period’s literature, history, philosophy, music, print culture – in short, all scholars of Medieval and Early Modern culture – whose research finds a focal point in issues relating to the cultural and historical dynamics of the Iberian worlds.