About

Andrés Vélez Posada is a Post-doctoral Research Associate on the European Research Council-funded project Genius before Romanticism: Ingenuity in Early Modern Art and ScienceHe is also Assistant Professor in the Humanities Department at Universidad EAFIT in Medellin since 2014. His primary interests lie in the history of sciences and knowledges of both European Renaissance and Colonial Latin America. Before joining the project team in February 2018, Andrés completed his PhD in History at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales –EHESS- in Paris, where he focused on how the early modern notion of ingenium and its iconography entailed economic or productive interpretations of nature, and how it was used to understand the variety of human beings, the creativity and the different qualities of places on Earth. 

He joined the Genius before Romanticism project team in February 2018. 

Project

Andrés is working on research on the topic of “ingenious nature” in the early modern Atlantic cultures. He is particularly interested in how nature was conceived as a productive entity through the images and representations of ingenuity, such as they appeared abundantly in philosophical, medical and geographical knowledges. The idea of nature as a productive agent was a persistent one during the early modern age, and was expressed by operative metaphors conceiving nature as a machine (machina mundi) and as a productive artist (natura artifex). Such economic and artistic thinking was undoubtedly connected to the abundant terminology and representations related to the paradigmatic ingenium. In his monograph, Andres explores the Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (The Examination of Men's Wits), a celebrated book written by Juan Huarte between 1575 and 1588. In this natural philosophical treatise, the Spanish physician tried to distinguish and to evaluate the connected productivity and variety of both, nature and human nature.

Selected Publications

Books

2017: with Pablo Castro López and Jorge Lopera Gómez, Wanderjahre: Años de viaje en el Trópico (Medellín: Editorial EAFIT).

2006: Figuras del Ingenio. Estudio sobre la fuerza de la Analogía y la Ironía (Medellín, Editorial UPB).

Editorships

2017: with Leonardo Carrió Cataldi and Jean-Marc Besse, special number: Entre le Ciel et la Terre : savoirs et cosmographie à la Renaissance. L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques, EHESS, 2017: Vol. 17 [https://acrh.revues.org/7863]. Direction, edition and presentation.

2016: with Isidro Vanegas and Daniel Gutiérrez Ardila, special number: La referencia de los Estados Unidos en las naciones de la América Española. Revista Co-Herencia, 2016: Vol. 13, 25.

Articles and book chapters related to ingenuity

2017: “Lo profundo y lo subterráneo en las tempranas descripciones del Nuevo Reino de Granada. Literatura geográfica colonial y tradición cosmográfica en el siglo XVI”. In Del mundo al mapa y del mapa al mundo, ed. Alejandra Vega ( Santiago de Chile, Universidad de Chile: 2017), pp., 503-514.

2016: “Pintura y corografía: Joris Hoefnagel y los paisajes emblemáticos de España e Italia (1563-1601)”. In Dibujar y pintar el mundo: arte, cartografía y política, ed. Mauricio Nieto y Sebastián Díaz Ángel (Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2016) pp., 198-203.

2015: “Irradiaciones del ingenium. Representaciones cosmológicas y poder generativo de la naturaleza durante el Renacimiento”. Co-Herencia, 12, no. 23, (2015): 233-262.

2013: “Latin et langues vulgaires aux débuts de la Modernité. Une réflexion sur la notion d’ingenium chez Descartes”, In Traduire, transmettre ou trahir ? Réflexions sur la traduction en sciences humaines, ed.  Jennifer K. Dick y Stephanie Schwerter (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2013,), pp., 175-183.

2012: “The Forum Vulcani in the Work of Juan Huarte. Geographical Argument and Renaissance Medicine”, In Greek Science in the Long Run: Essays on the Greek Scientific Tradition (4th c. BCE-17th c. CE), ed. Paula Olmos (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), pp., 301-321.

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