Dr Surekha Davies

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow (2009-2012)

Contact details

Department of History, Classics and Archaeology
Birkbeck, University of London, Room 201a,
30 Russell Square, Bloomsbury
London WC1B 5DQ

Email: s.davies@bbk.ac.uk
Tel: 020 3073 8013 

About Dr Surekha Davies

• Dr Surekha Davies is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow (2009-2012) at Birkbeck.
• View Dr Surekha Davies' CV
• View the conference announcement for 'The Global Dimensions of European Knowledge, 1450-1700' (June 2011)

Research interests

• I work on early modern history, c. 1450-1800, and have three broad subject concentrations: the histories of science and knowledge, cross-cultural encounters and European overseas expansion in the Americas, Asia and Africa; and cultural history.
• If you are interested in pursuing research in any of these areas, you should first read our advice on how to apply for MPhil/PhD research before submitting an application.
• I am preparing a monograph entitled America Newly Described: Ethnography and Imagery on European Maps, 1500-1650. In it I argue that the transfer of ethnographic information from travel writing to maps was crucial for the emergence of stereotypes of indigenous American peoples. This research highlights the importance of comparative approaches to understanding the shaping of knowledge, considering the political, economic, social and intellectual contexts in which information circulated. It is based on the comparative analysis of travel and geographical literature and manuscript and printed illustrated maps produced in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the German lands, the Low Countries and England.
• My current research project is Ethnographic Observations and European Ethnology: Genres, Practices and the Construction of Knowledge, 1550-1700. It considers representations of African, Asian and American peoples across several genres. By exploring the movement of information from eye-witness accounts to works written or compiled by people who had not travelled, it links the parts played by travellers and writers in shaping ideas about distant peoples.
• I am on the Editorial Board of The Oxford Edition of Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1598-1600), for which I am the Map Editor.
• I am also a collaborator on the Digital Mappaemundi project, a US-based project that was recently awarded National Endowment for the Humanities and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grants.

Teaching interests

• European history, 1450-1800
• Atlantic history
• Global history
• Cultural and intellectual history
• Histories of science and knowledge
• Cultural encounters
• Ethnography and travel writing
• Courses I teach include MA options on European Visions of Amerindian Peoples, 1492-1654 and Travel, Empires and Cultural Encounters, 1500-1800.
• I am a lecturer on the European History, 1500-1800 BA Group 1 module.
• I also contribute of MA core courses for the MA degrees in Early Modern History, European History, and Renaissance Studies.

Books

• America Newly Described: Ethnography and Images on European Maps, 1500-1650 (manuscript in preparation).

Edited Collection

• Special issue of History and Anthropology, co-edited with Neil L. Whitehead (selected papers presented at the ‘Encounters, Ethnography and Ethnology: Continuities and Ruptures’ workshop, London, 2010) (forthcoming, Dec. 2011).

Articles

• ‘Maps, the Wondrous East and Sources of Ethnographic Authority, 1400-1650’  (in course of revising).
• 'Text, Map and Image: America and its Inhabitants in Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia universalis, 1550', Renaissance Studies (forthcoming).
• 'The Navigational Iconography of Diogo Ribeiro's 1529 Vatican Planisphere', Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography, 55, 2003, pp. 103-112.
• 'Agency and Awareness in Cross-Cultural Encounters', Terrae Incognitae: The Journal of the Society for the History of Discoveries, 34, 2002, pp. 1-16.

Book Chapters

• ‘Monsters from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment’, in Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle (Aldershot, forthcoming, 2012).
• ‘L’Iconographie des mondes nouveau’, in Les Portulans, XIIIe –XVIIIe siècles (tentative title), ed. C. Hofmann et al (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, exhib. catalogue, in course of writing, publication in 2012).

Book reviews

• Merry Wiesner-Hanks, The Marvelous Hairy Girls:
The Gonzales Sisters and their Worlds (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009) and Jennifer Spinks, Monstrous Births And Visual Culture In Sixteenth-Century Germany (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009) in Journal of Early Modern History, 14:4 (2010), 388-92.
• Liam Matthew Brockey, ed., Portuguese Colonial Cities in the Early Modern World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008) and Patrick O’Flanagan, Port Cities of Atlantic Iberia, c. 1500-1900 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008) for Urban History, 37 (2010), 336-8.
• Catalin Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism, transl. Alistair Ian Blyth (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009) for Intellectual History Review (forthcoming).
• María M. Portuondo, Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (Chicago University Press, 2009) for Renaissance Quarterly (forthcoming).
• Pamela H. Smith & Benjamin Schmidt, eds, Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400-1800 (Chicago, IL and London: Chicago University Press, 2007) for Renaissance Studies, 23:5 (2009) (forthcoming).
• Günter Schilder, Monumenta Cartographica Neerlandica VIII: Jodocus Hondius (1563-1612) and Petrus Kaerius (1571- c. 1646) (Alphen aan den Rijn: Canaletto/Repro Holland, 2007), 596pp. + portfolio, for Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography, 61:1 (2009), pp. 115-6.
• James R. Enterline, Erikson, Eskimos and Columbus: Medieval European Knowledge of America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) for Bulletin of the Society of Cartographers, 36:2 (2002), p. 77.

Other academic publications

• Extended dissertation abstract in Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography, 61:1 (2009), pp. 126-8.
• 'The Scientific Iconography of Diogo Ribeiro's 1529 Planisphere' in Actas: XIX congreso internacional de historia de la cartografía (Proceedings: 19th International Conference on the History of Cartography), Madrid, CD-Rom, 2002.

Publications for a wider audience

• Contributor to The Map Book, ed. Peter Barber (London, 2006)
• Contributor to The Lie of the Land: The Secret Life of Maps, eds April Carlucci and Peter Barber (London, 2001).
• 'Taming the Land of Monsters: Dutch maps of Brazil c.1596-1643' on www.fathom.com (2002).

Awards

• Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2009-2012).
• Society for Renaissance Studies Conference Grant towards organization of The Global Dimensions of European Knowledge, 1450-1700 conference, June, 2011 (2010).
• Newberry Library, Chicago, Short-Term Fellowship in the History of Cartography (2006).
• Society for Renaissance Studies Fellowship (2006).
• American Friends of the J. B. Harley Research Fellowships, Travel Fellowship (2003 and 2001).