Biography

Andrés Vélez-Posada is Full Professor of Humanities at Universidad EAFIT (Medellin, Colombia). He works on the history of knowledge in early modern Europe and Spanish America, with a particular focus on the production, adaptation, and politics of philosophical, medical, geographical, and metallurgical knowledges in tropical contexts. He has been Invited Professor at the Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and has held a postdoctoral position at the University of Cambridge, and fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library (Brown University) and the Descartes Centre (Utrecht University). He holds a PhD in History and a MPhil in Social and Cognitive Sciences from the EHESS.

Project Summary

The Renaissance discussion about ingenuity travelled between Europe and the Americas. Since late fifteenth-century, treatises on art, geography, and medicine developed the concept of ingenuity (ingenium, ingegno, ingenio) that predated the romantic genius, and named the difference of people, technical skills, environmental characteristics of places, and artifacts that caused astonishment and solved problems. But during the European process of conquest and settlement in the Americas a new understanding of ingenuity among Christian intelligentsia emerged. In that context, the humanist tradition of ingenuity was appropriated to describe the communities, artisanal practices, and environments of Spanish America. This project intends to show how this capacious notion challenged European global epistemic projects by inserting multicentered debates on human diversity. Instead of an unproblematic, steady process of universalization, the early modern global history of ingenuity produced and contested new ethnicities and cultural values. In that sense, this research will analyze how the Renaissance ideas and language of ingenuity in the Italian and Spanish intellectual traditions were received, translated, and negotiated in the New World realities, and how they returned to southern Europe to be reconfigured.