简介

Margaret Ewalt, Associate Professor of Spanish, has been teaching at Wake Forest University since 2001. She received her B.A. from Colby College, Maine and her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Her teaching, research, and publication interests include the Enlightenment in Spain and Spanish America, Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Latin American Literature, and Colonial Spanish American Literature. She is the author of Peripheral Wonders: Nature, Knowledge, and Enlightenment in the Eighteenth-Century Orinoco (Bucknell University Press, 2008) and several articles on trans-Atlantic eighteenth-century natural history writing. Baconian practitioners in Spanish America opened learned discourse to Amerindian and West African epistemologies and folded alternative knowledge paradigms into the wider, universalizing narrative of European scientific progress and modernization. Currently reading for evidence of these complex reciprocities of transcultural knowledge production, Dr. Ewalt hopes that her second book, tentatively titled, Francis Bacon in Hispanic Science: Knowledge, the Nature of Modernity, and the Spanish World, 1539-1782 will push beyond Eurocentric critical boundaries and expand the questions that scholars pose about textual evidence.