Keynote address

Translation Generation: Constructing  the Colonial Encyclopedia in a Lisbon Printing-House

NEIL SAFIER (BROWN UNIVERSITY)

Neil Safier is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Brown University and is affiliated with the Department of Hispanic Studies, the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative. From 2013 to 2021, he served as Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library. He received his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University in 2004 and has held teaching and research appointments at the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, and most recently at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He is the author of Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago, 2008; paperback edition, 2012), which was awarded the 2009 Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies and the Institut Français d’Amérique. A Spanish translation, La Medición del Nuevo Mundo, was released from Marcial Pons (Madrid) in 2016. Recipient of numerous research fellowships at libraries and archives, including the Huntington Library, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, the New York Botanical Garden, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, he has a wide collection of published books and articles to his name, including essays in Isis, Book History, The Huntington Library Quarterly, Revista Brasileira de História, and Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales. He also serves on a number of international academic and library boards, including the History of Science Society and the Council of Cultural Patrimony of the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey (Mexico), in addition to being a member of the Grolier Club and the American Antiquarian Society. His current research relates to the history of knowledge-making and collecting in the Luso-Brazilian world during the Age of Revolution and the environmental and ethnographic history of the Amazon River basin from the prehuman to the present.