James Dunkerley, currently the Andrés Bello Chair in Latin American Cultures and Civilizations at New York University, will deliver two lectures this fall as part of a series of events he is organizing for NYUs King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center and the Department of History. The lectures take place at the Center, 53 Washington Square South. They are free and open to the public. For more information, call 212.998.3650 or visit www.nyu.edu/kjc.
On Tuesday, September 22, at 6:30 p.m., Dunkerley will speak on Where is Carlos Montufar? Scenes of Sensibility in the Scientific Life of Alexander von Humbold. This talk takes a look at an incident that took place in 1802 outside Quito, Ecuador as a means by which to review Humboldts reputation as both a man and his practice as a scholar.
On Tuesday, November 17, at 6:30 p.m., Andrés Bello and the Role of Scholarship in Nation-Building will be the topic of Dunkerleys lecture. Bello, author of the Chilean Civil Code and founder of the Universidad de Chile, has often been celebrated or dismissed as a conservative without much attention to the non-heroic tasks of building republics in the 19th century.
Dunkerley is professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of ten books and three edited volumes. For the past ten years, he has served as director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of London and as the founding director of the Institute for the Study of the Americas.
Dunkerley has organized a series of talks, Behind the Name , which will reconsider famous (and infamous) figures in history, scholarship, and the creative arts of Latin America in the light of new evidence and/or interpretations. The first lecture at the NYU King Juan Carlos Center takes place on Tuesday, October 6. A panel on December 1 will focus on the 2005 election in Bolivia and its significance for democracy in that country.