Overview

The Inter-American Institute for Advanced Studies in Cultural History was organized to promote interdisciplinary research and publication by scholars working in Latin-American cultural history.  The activities of the Institute are briefly summarized below.

Research Library and Slides

The Institute maintains a small research library of many hard to find older publications together with a large collection of slides surveying topics in Ibero-American art and architectural history. The catalogues and general summary of the slide collection are posted here on this site and the images are available to serious scholars upon request on terms that vary depending on end use. In some cases the images may be provided at no charge. They are available either by e-mail of the scanned image or by duplicate of the slide itself, depending on end-use requirements. The images can be scanned at resolutions up to 2400 dpi. In special cases a CD can be prepared for large files or multiple images.

Lecture Series

The Institute has developed a series of 15 slide lectures providing an introductory survey of Ibero-American Architectural History. These lectures draw on the Institute's extensive slide collection and are now being prepared for distribution on CD format. The series includes overviews of Pre-Columbian America from the South West of the United States to the Andean Highlands and Spain from the time of the Roman occupation until the end of the reign of Philip II, and a dozen more lectures surveying the three centuries of the colonial era and exploring the continuing presence of historic and contemporary Hispanic architecture and style in the United States. A more complete description of the lecture series is posted on this site under Current Projects. A segment of this series introducing the theme of Mudejar art in the New World, "Scattering Seeds from the Garden of Allah," will be presented in the Fall of 2000 at a conference jointly hosted by the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the Virginia Commonwealth University. 

Conferences

The Institute sponsors  occasional events examining cultural transmission including the October 1995 conference Cultural Transmission and Transformation in the Ibero-American World, 1200 -1800,  held at  Donaldson Brown Center at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. The Symposia and papers of this conference will be published here. An upcoming conference, now in planning, will focus on human ecological manipulation resulting in Disease and Disaster in Pre-Columbian and Colonial America.

Ongoing Research

The institute actively initiates and contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship and publication, including most recently the paper "Was the Huey Cocoliztli a Hemorrhagic Fever?" (Co-authored with John S. Marr, M.D., M.P.H.) In Medical History, 2000, 44: 341-362.  London: Wellcome Trust. Further work on this initiative will examine epidemic disease in late pre-Columbian Peru. A working page for colleagues involved in this project, some of whom are currently in the field in Peru, is posted on this site for the convenience of the research team.