Date/Time: Thursday 15th March 2018, 17:00-18:00 followed by a drinks reception

Venue: Barbara Strang Teaching Centre, B.32

This is the third in a series of annual lectures in memory of Vanessa Knights (1969-2007) who was lecturer in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at Newcastle University from 1995 until her early death.

We are very pleased to announce that the 2018 lecture will be given by Matthew Restall, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Colonial Latin American History at Penn State University. Matthew's talk is titled The Day The World Changed: Montezuma, Cortés, and One of History's Greatest Lies.

Abstract

On November 8, 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés first met Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, at the entrance to the capital city of Tenochtitlan. This encounter has long been seen as Cortés’s bold and brilliant initiation of European colonization on the American mainland. Montezuma, on the other hand, is remembered as a coward who gave away a vast empire. But is this really what happened? In a challenge to traditional tellings, Restall's lecture—drawing upon his new book, When Montezuma Met Cortés—uses “the Meeting" as the entry point into a comprehensive reevaluation of both Cortés and Montezuma. Drawing on a vast variety of sources, Restall explores Cortés’s and Montezuma’s posthumous reputations and the worlds in which they lived—leading to a dramatic inversion of the old story. This sweeping, revisionist account of a pivotal moment in modern civilization calls into question our view of the history of the Americas, and, indeed, of history itself.

 

About Vanessa Knights

The Vanessa Knights Lecture in Latin American and Caribbean Studies is an annual event organised by CLACS. It is in memory of our colleague Vanessa Knights, who sadly died very young in 2007. She published on the bolero, nationalism, diaspora and science fiction, and feminism and women's movements in contemporary Spain and Latin America. She was vice-president of Women in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies in 2003-2004 and was a member of numerous scholarly organisations.

If you didn’t know her, you can read about her here.