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Professor Teofilo Ruiz |
UCLA History Professor Teofilo Ruiz will present “The Other 1492” on September 28, 2011 at 7:00 p.m. in the Topping Room, Old Chapel (Room 212) at Randolph-Macon College. This event is sponsored by the Visiting Scholars Program of
Phi Beta Kappa and the Zeta chapter at R-MC.
This event is free and open to the public.
1492 has long been seen as the “miracle year” of the Spanish realms. This lecture addresses the importance of 1492 from different perspectives. Instead of examining the so-called achievements of the Catholic Monarchs (their victory over Granada, religious and political unity, and the encounter with the New World), Ruiz will look at what the events of 1492 meant for those who bore, on their flesh, the brunt of a new centralized monarchy, religious intolerance, and colonial expansion.
Ruiz’ focus is on Jews, Conversos, Muslims, Moriscos, and the natives of the New World for whom 1492 represented a radical and catastrophic change in their individual and collective lives. By examining the history of Jews, Muslims, and New World natives during the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity, we see the growing intolerance ushered in by military conquest, religious intolerance, and political centralization.
During his distinguished career, Ruiz has taught at Brooklyn College, the CUNY Graduate Center, the University of Michigan, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, and was the 250th Anniversary Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton before joining the history department at UCLA in 1998. In 2008, he received the university’s Distinguished Teaching Award.
Ruiz has received fellowships from the NEH, the Mellon Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the ACLS. In 1994, he was selected as one of only four U.S. Professors of the Year by CASE and by the Carnegie Foundation. A specialist in the social and popular culture of late medieval and early modern Castile, Ruiz is the author of several books, including
Crisis and Continuity: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile, which won the Biennial Award for the best book on Spanish History from the American Historical Association;
Spanish Society, 1400-1600;
From Heaven to Earth: The Reordering of Castilian Society in the Late Middle Ages, 1150-1350 and
Reflections on the Terror of History (forthcoming).