Celebrating Recent Work by Seth Kimmel

October 22, 2025

The Librarian’s Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain
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

Seth Kimmel is Associate Professor of Early Modern Cultural Studies and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, as well as Director of Columbia's Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life. His research focuses on the literatures and cultures of medieval and early modern Iberia, debates about religion and secularism, and the history of information management. His award-winning first book, Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain (University of Chicago Press, 2015), is an intellectual history of New Christian assimilation in the sixteenth century.

About the Speakers

Bruno Bosteels 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.

Mayte Green Mercado is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University–Newark and the Newark Campus Director for the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice st Rutgers University. 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. Her current book project is concerned with histories of displacement, migration, and refugees in the early modern Mediterranean.

Alessandra Russo 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.

A. Tunç Şen 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.