Dr. Stephanie Rohner

Biography

Stephanie Rohner holds an MA, MPhil, and PhD in Spanish from Yale University. Her area of specialization is Colonial Latin American literature and culture, with a particular interest in the transatlantic circulation of indigenous literary, historiographical, and visual discourses. Her research is driven by questions concerning how modern ideas of the pre-Columbian past in Latin America were formed. She focuses on the eighteenth century as a key moment for innovative approaches to the exploration of archaeological sites and an explosion in antiquarian studies, which were in dialogue with philosophical and scientific trends of the European Enlightenment, leading to deeply renewed understandings of indigenous histories and material cultures. Her current book project centers on the efforts of eighteenth-century Mexican Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavigero to compile the pre-Columbian history of Mexico and to systematize native epistemologies during his exile in Italy. The project conceptualizes Clavigero’s "Historia antigua de México" (1780-1781) as a discursive 'museum' that offers an original defense of the study of Mexican antiquities, particularly indigenous pictorial and alphabetic texts, and Mesoamerican material culture. Her research has been supported by awards from the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University and the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Research Interests