Nicolás Wey-Gómez
Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies:
Hispanic Studies
Phone: +1 401 863 2915
Nicolas_Wey-Gomez@brown.edu
Nicolás Wey-Gómez studies the Early Transatlantic Encounter. His research combines the literary study of early letters, chronicles, and histories about the discovery, conquest, and colonization of the Spanish Americas with the history of medieval and early modern science and technology. This research aims at providing a description and analysis of the structures of knowledge that accompanied the rise of colonialist and anti-colonialist ideologies during the fifteenth and sixteenth-centuries. His work also studies the connections among literary works produced on both sides of the Atlantic between the fifteenth and seventeenth-centuries.
Biography
Nicolás Wey-Gómez was born in Bogotá, Colombia. He completed his B. A. in Latin American Studies at Brandeis University in 1986. In 1987, he completed an M. A. in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and in 1996, he received his doctoral degree in Latin American Literature from the same institution. He taught Hispanic Studies at MIT from 1993 to 2003. Since 2003, he has taught Early Transatlantic Studies at Brown. His work examines the epistemology of colonialism in the letters, chronicles, and histories written about the Euro-American encounter between 1492 and the seventeenth century.
Interests
Professor Wey-Gómez's first book, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies, has appeared in the book series Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology, edited by Jed Z. Buchwald for The MIT Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts (2008). In this book, Prof. Wey-Gómez argues against the established view regarding the Discovery that Columbus merely sailed "west" across the Atlantic. He shows instead that Columbus purposefully and methodically sailed "'south" in the course of his four voyages in search of the rich natural and human resources he expected to find in the belt of the tropics – a region of the globe long deemed "uninhabitable'" by Mediterranean geographers. This fact concerning the geographical orientation of the Indies enterprise was amply acknowledged, not only in Columbus's writings, but in a vast range of documents drafted in the wake of his discoveries: from the bulls of "donation'" by Pope Alexander VI granting Spain jurisdiction over the lands and peoples newly discovered "to the west and to the south;" to the works of historians, cartographers, and cosmographers who, in the course of a century, celebrated the geographical accomplishments of the Spanish and Portuguese; to the philosophical arguments wielded by learned scholars who set out to establish (or contest) Spain's legal titles to its occupation of the Americas.
As Prof. Wey-Gómez argues, in Columbus's systematic "southing," we have not only an answer to the most vexing questions that have riddled the geographical history of the Discovery, but also a crucial model for understanding fully the deep assumptions that accompanied Europe's colonial awakening to the tropical places and peoples of Atlantic Africa, America, the greater Basin of the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific Ocean. Columbus's distinction between a "temperate'" Europe and a "hot" Caribbean basin drew, no matter how imperfectly, from a learned scientific and technical tradition that conceived of "place" as the basis for explaining and predicting the constitution, behavior, and, even more significantly, the role of all creatures in the "machine" of the cosmos. And the lessons Columbus drew from this tradition concerning the nature of the places and peoples he had sought to find provided critical legitimacy to the process of territorial and political expansion that his contemporaries were consciously coming to construe as the "invention" or discovery of the immensely productive region of the globe then known as the "torrid zone." The Tropics of Empire proposes a radical change in our understanding of the fundamentals that Columbus is supposed to have culled from ancient and medieval sources, and of the character of the Enterprise of the Indies. It also offers an unprecedented account of the complex epistemic system that had connected geographical knowledge with political theory in Christian Europe since the momentous arrival of Greek and Arabic scientific and technical thought in the 12th and 13th-centuries. Prof. Wey-Gómez closely examines the logic that tied such seemingly disparate disciplines as Christian theology, metaphysics, physics, mathematics, geometry, astronomy, astrology, optics, the psychology and physiology of humans, beasts, and plants, and those areas of "moral" philosophy known today as ethics, politics, and economics.
The Tropics of Empire is profoundly interdisciplinary in nature, and it is written for a readership in fields such as Cultural Anthropology, Geography, History of Science and Technology, Intellectual History, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy. More than just a reading of Columbus's diario and letters, The Tropics of Empire constitutes an analysis of the epistemic system that, over a period of nearly two-thousand years, paved the way for early modern European colonialism.
Prof. Wey-Gómez is now also working on a second book titled "The Machine of the World: Nature's Culture in the Early Spanish Colonial Americas," which examines the moral authority of the natural sciences in the production of a highly politicized European ethnography in the Americas during the 16th-century. He studies four major works - Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés's Historia general y natural de las Indias, Bartolomé de las Casas's Apologética historia, the "Florentine Codex" by Bernardino de Sahagún, and Joseph de Acosta's Historia natural y moral de las Indias - in the context of an institutional controversy in imperial Spain that was fostered by the abuses and cruelties committed against New World peoples by Spanish conquistadores and encomenderos during the early decades of the transatlantic encounter. Was there any ground to justify Spain's subjection and enslavement of Indians? These ethnographers fall on both sides of this legal controversy and offer some of the most complete and influential considerations of this question produced in the Spanish empire during the 16th and early 17th- centuries. Prof. Wey-Gómez's interest, however, lies less in the history of the debate itself, which historians like Lewis Hanke and Anthony Pagden have amply examined, than in the philosophical frameworks that informed polemical narratives explicitly or implicitly labeled as "natural and moral histories" of the Americas. How did scholasticism (and humanism) answer to the "question" of the Indian in these narratives? Prof. Wey-Gómez's focus is on the problematic boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate areas of knowledge in Europe such as "natural" and "superstitious" astrology or "natural" and "demonic" magic, and on the use of these boundaries to classify and evaluate Amerindian structures of knowledge.
Degrees
M.A.-Ph.D. (Johns Hopkins University, 1996), M. A. (The Writing Seminars, Johns Hopkins University, 1987),
Awards
2009: Honorable Mention, awarded to The MIT Press for The Tropics of Empire in the category of World History and Biography of the 2008 American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (The PROSE Awards).
2008-present: Invited Research Associate, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University.
JUN. 2008: The Tropics of Empire, funded in part by the 2007 Premio Grinzane Editoria, awarded to the MIT Press in May 2007 by Premio Grinzane Cavour.
SPR. 2007: Invited Visiting Scholar, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University.
SPR. 2007: Faculty Research Fellow. "Nature's Disciplines," Research Group with Evelyn Lincoln and Tara Nummedal. Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University. Renewed Fall 2007.
SMR. 2004: Advisor, Undergraduate Teaching and Research Awards (UTRA). Advisee: Brian Lee ('05).
1999-2002: Class of 1954 Career Development Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
1998-1999: Senior Fellow, Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
1998-1999: National Endowment for the Humanities Post-doctoral Fellow, The John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island [Declined].
1998-1999: Old Dominion Fellow. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
SMR. 1989: National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, "Re-Creating the New World Contact: Indigenous Languages and Literature of Latin America," Summer Institute, University of Texas, Austin.
Affiliations
Colonial American Studies Organization (CASO; Founding Member).
Latin American Studies Association (LASA).
Renaissance Society of America (RSA) .
Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Literature.
American Historical Association (AHA).
History of Science Society (HSS).
Modern Language Association (MLA).
Teaching
Professor Wey-Gómez has taught graduate seminars on the intellectual history of the Discovery and the early debate on the legality of the Spanish conquest of the Americas; Indian and Mestizo chroniclers of Mexico and Peru; and the picaresque tradition on both sides of the Atlantic. His undergraduate courses have included letters, chronicles, and histories of the exploration, conquest, and colonization of the New World, Spanish Golden Age theatre, Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quijote, literature of violence in Spain and the Spanish Americas, and Hispanic film and TV.
Funded Research
SPR. 2007: Faculty Research Fellow. "Nature's Disciplines," Research Group with Evelyn Lincoln and Tara Nummedal. Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University, $3,800.00. Renewed Fall 2007, $4,000.00.
SMR. 2004: Advisor, Undergraduate Teaching and Research Awards (UTRA). Advisee: Brian Lee ('05), $3,000.00.
1999-2002: Class of 1954 Career Development Professorship, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, $50,000.00.
1998-1999: Senior Fellowship, Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, $28,000.00
1998-1999: National Endowment for the Humanities Post-doctoral Fellowship, The John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island. [Declined]
1998-1999: Old Dominion Fellowship. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, half year salary.
