The Dissertation Workshop is a graduate educational seminar open to graduate students and their advisors. Spring workshops will be held in-person and are only open to Harvard and MIT affiliates who are on a regular University COVID-19 testing cadence. The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) invites graduate students who are interested in presenting their research or to RSVP for this workshop to contact CES Dissertation Workshop Coordinator Hansong Li.
In his doctoral research, Sergio Leos studies the consequences of the connections between the New World and Europe in the Iberian Atlantic world of the 16th and 17th centuries. He is keenly interested in the way Europeans grappled with, interpreted, and accommodated the unfamiliar realities of the New World. In this work-in-progress, Leos examines how the prevalent allegorical depictions of “America" in the Early Modern period reflect the interests of European imperial powers. The decades following the European overseas expansion in the fifteenth century prompted new modes of thinking and seeing the world, but these representations relied on conventional imagery and gender norms to communicate their meaning. By considering the semiotic context of these allegorical images of the four continents, especially the implications of the rendering of gender, Leos will weigh the propagandistic aspirations or “desires" of European imperial powers.
