As the first event of the winter of 2019, we are proud to have Kathryn Joy McKnight, Associate Professor of the University of New Mexico, to give a public lecture entitled: “Battling for Definition: Healing and Gender among Afro-Iberian Herbalists in 17th-Century Cartagena de Indias.” The talk will be on Thursday, January 10th, from 12:30pm to 1:50pm, at Foster 103 (1130 E. 59th St).

Afro-Iberian women healers in Cartagena de Indias provided essential services where disease and injury surpassed the capacity of the city’s European doctors. Their use of herbal and ritual remedies was often more effective than the latters’ purges and bloodlettings. These women were also feared, as the African-descent population surged beyond that of Europeans in a multiracial imperial port city. They became the target of imperial and inquisitorial attack, labeled as a “great conspiracy of witches” in the 1630s. This talk teases out the gendered competition for definition of self and of urban space by casta healers who told stories with words and movement through hospitals, jails, city walls, neighborhoods, churches, and homes, playing on the vulnerabilities expressed in elite representations of urban space. The talk draws especially on the Inquisition trials of herbalist Paula de Eguiluz and surgeon Diego Lopez whose stories try alternately to arouse and allay the fears of the Iberians they lived with and treated.

A light lunch will be served.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) at the University of Chicago. RSVP here!