Monday, November 23, 2026
Tea & Cookies at 4:00pm, Lecture at 4:15pm
Alumni Hall at Victoria College (Click for Map)
73 Queen’s Park Crescent.
In recognition of the importance of the Centre’s Erasmus collection, each year a scholar of international reputation is invited to present a formal fall lecture at the CRRS. The CRRS is delighted to welcome Prof. Allison Bigelow to deliver the 2026 Erasmus Lecture.
The shimmering silver of Potosí radically remade global networks of economic, intellectual, and artistic exchange throughout the early modern world. But in the shadow of the Cerro Rico, a much smaller mining industry emerged in the colonial Andes: the extraction of wak’as, or sacred spaces where believers buried textiles and metallic goods to facilitate connections with ancestors. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spanish colonial officials and Catholic authorities went back and forth on whether and how to sanction and tax the mining of these holy underground deposits. Owners of wak’a mining firms thus navigated a complex and shifting administrative landscape in order to secure licenses for their work – one that produced a rich documentary record of an extractive industry that was otherwise wrapped in secrecy. By comparing the legal strategies that Black, Indigenous, and Spanish business owners used to secure licenses, this talk uses an understudied notarial corpus to suggest how subjects from different racial, ethnic, and artisan classes positioned themselves in relationship to the state, to sacred Andean space, and to new forms of colonial community.
Allison Bigelow is an associate professor in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Notre Dame, where she teaches classes on the history of science and technology in Latin America, public monuments and historical memory, and community-engaged research methods. Her first book, Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Early Modern Iberian World, was published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American for the University of North Carolina Press in 2020. Her current book project, co-authored with Tribal consultants, traces the lifecycle of the University of Virginia’s monument to George Rogers Clark, which stood on the campus from 1921 to 2021.
