Surekha Davies
Warner Hall 225a
Office Phone: 203-837-3912
Email:
daviess@wcsu.edu
Education:
PhD in Combined Historical Studies, Warburg Institute, University of
London, 2009
M.Phil in History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University, 1997
BA (Hons.) (Cantab.) History and Philosophy of Science, Robinson
College, Cambridge University, 1996
Teaching Interests:
Early Modern Europe
Travel, Empire, and Cultural Encounters
Science and Medicine
Witchcraft and Society
History of Cartography
History of Knowledge
Research Interests and
Publications:
The research interests of Dr Surekha Davies include cultural encounters, travel writing, the histories of knowledge and science, geographical exploration, cartography, monstrous bodies and the history of mentalities c.1450-1800. She has worked on aspects of English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Dutch responses to new worlds. Her current project is entitled Ethnographic Observations and European Ethnology: Genres, Practices, and the Construction of Knowledge, 1550-1700 . It examines representations of African, Asian and American peoples across a variety of textual and visual genres and artefacts.
Selected Publications
Mapping the Peoples of the New World: Ethnography, Imagery and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (under contract, Cambridge University Press).
‘French Depictions of Brazilians on Sixteenth-Century Maps’, The Historical Journal:55:2 (2012), 217-38.
‘From Maps to Mummy-Curses: Re-thinking Encounters, Ethnography and Ethnology’, History and Anthropology, 23:2 (2012), 173-182 (co-authored with Neil L. Whitehead).
‘The Wondrous East in the Renaissance Geographical Imagination: Marco Polo, Fra Mauro and Giovanni Battista Ramusio’, History and Anthropology, 23:2 (2012), 215-34, in a special issue: Encounters, Ethnography and Ethnology: Continuities and Ruptures, eds Surekha Davies and Neil L. Whitehead.
‘The Unlucky, the Bad and the Ugly: Categories of Monstrosity from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment’ in Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle (Aldershot, 2012).
‘America and Amerindians in Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia universlis libri VI 1550’, Renaissance Studies 25:3 (2011), 351-73.
‘The Navigational Iconography of Diogo Ribeiro's 1529 Vatican Planisphere’, Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography, 55 (2003), 103-12.
‘Interpreting Anthropological Encounters’, Terrae Incognitae: The Journal for the HIstory of Discoveries, 45 (2002), 1-16.
