Celebrating Recent Work by Seth Kimmel

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by Seth Kimmel

A history of early modern libraries and the imperial desire for total knowledge.

Medieval scholars imagined the library as a microcosm of the world, but as novel early modern ways of managing information facilitated empire in both the New and Old Worlds, the world became a projection of the library. In The Librarian’s Atlas, Seth Kimmel offers a sweeping material history of how the desire to catalog books coincided in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the aspiration to control territory. Through a careful study of library culture in Spain and Morocco—close readings of catalogs, marginalia, indexes, commentaries, and maps—Kimmel reveals how the booklover’s dream of a comprehensive and well-organized library shaped an expanded sense of the world itself.

About the Author

 is the Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures. Before joining Columbia’s Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures in 2012, Seth spent two years as a member of Stanford University’s Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities. During the 2018-2019 academic year, Seth was the John Elliott Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. At Columbia, he is on the executive committee of both the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. He serves on the joint Columbia College and School of General Studies Committee on Instruction (COI) and recently completed a two-year term as a Columbia University Senator. During the 2024-25 academic year, Seth will be on leave in Seville, Spain.

About the Speakers

 is Dean of Humanities and Jesse and George Siegel Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, with a joint appointment in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Prior to returning to Columbia in 2016, he taught for many years at Harvard and Cornell University. His research covers a wide range of topics in literature, culture, and politics in modern Latin America as well as contemporary philosophy and political theory.

is an Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University–Newark. Her research focuses on medieval and early modern Mediterranean history. She teaches courses on Islamic Civilization, Islamic history in Spain and North Africa, and early modern Mediterranean history. Her courses deal with questions of religion, politics, identity, and race and ethnicity in the medieval and early modern periods. She also leads study abroad programs around the Mediterranean. Her current book project is concerned with histories of displacement, migration, and refugees in the early modern Mediterranean.

 is Professor and Chair of the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and Director of the Hispanic Institute. Her research studies the theory, practice, and display of the arts in the early modern times, with a special emphasis on the artistic dynamics in the context of the Iberian colonization. 

 is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Columbia University. He specializes in the history of the Ottoman Empire and its many connections with the early modern world. As a social and cultural historian of intellectual practices, Şen primarily focuses on how people perceived the world, the frameworks into which they fit information and beliefs, and the social, political, economic, and emotional structures that shaped and were shaped by their ways of knowing.



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