Environmental Humanities Seminar with Julio Aguilar
Date and Time
Location
"Drinking Water in the Silver City of Potosí: Hydraulic Infrastructures and Practices in the Colonial Andes"
Speaker: Julio Aguilar, 2022-23 MHC Postdoctoral Fellow
Respondent: Gabriela Soto Laveaga
Julio Aguilar received a PhD in History at UC Davis, specializing in environmental and Andean social history. At the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, he will expand the humanistic and interdisciplinary foundations of his first book tentatively titled A Thirsty Colonization. Water and Environmental Transformations in the Silver City of Potosí. 1545-1790. This project explores the experience of tens of thousands of inhabitants, most of them Indigenous people, inhabiting a high-altitude urban mining landscape lacking permanent water sources and the interplay between the Andean environment and the Spanish colonization that led to the construction of one of the most ambitious engineering works to collect rainwater in the New World. In doing so, Julio seeks to provide a timely reflection on the pressing issue of how high-mountain societies in the Andes and beyond are constantly rebuilding their environments to meet water challenges triggered by climate change and extractive colonial economies and how the ever-changing physical environment plays an active role in human adaptations and livelihoods. His work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council´s Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) and the Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Prior to the PhD, he obtained a master’s degree in History with emphasis in Ethnohistory from the University of Chile and B.A in Education and professional degree in history and geography from the University of Tarapacá.
Gabriela Soto Laveaga is Professor of the History of Science and Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico at Harvard University. Her current research interests interrogate knowledge production and circulation between Mexico and India; medical professionals and social movements; and science and development projects in the twentieth century.
Registration is required for this event. RSVP via the link above.
About the Series
The Mahindra Humanities Center presents an Environmental Humanities seminar series with our 2022-23 postdoctoral fellows.