Dr. Nydia Pineda De Ávila

Biography

Nydia Pineda de Ávila works at the intersection of history and science, focusing on art history and early modern Europe and the Americas. She completed her PhD in English at Queen Mary, University of London, with a dissertation examining maps of the moon as prestige commodities and their interactions among natural philosophers, cosmographers, astronomers, humanists, intelligencers, artists, publishers, and in seventeenth-century Europe. Following her degree, she held a postdoctoral position at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where she began researching the material and political aspects of celestial images in the colonial Americas. Currently, she is completing a book manuscript that reveals the changing values of moon maps as visual experiments and rhetorical artifacts in the early stages of telescope development in European observatories, workshops, courts, and shops during the late eighteenth century. Nydia's research interrogates the relationship between experience, technical knowledge, and geographical exploration, seeking to understand cultural landscapes through map production. She is also initiating a new project on the representation of terrestrial and celestial environments in the itineraries between Acapulco and California during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nydia has lived in Mexico City, Cuernavaca, Edinburgh, Lyon, Paris, and London, and her academic interests extend into creative writing and French literature as well as Renaissance studies. She participates in various interdisciplinary research groups and has engaged with communities through public seminars.

Research Interests

Experience