Event Date
Please join us for the first History Department Colloquium of the quarter!
Elizabeth O’Brien and Altina Hoti discuss their NEH-funded translation of Sacred Embryology, one of the core texts at the intersection of surgical violence and debates about fetal personhood during the Enlightenment.
Join Zoom Meeting: https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/94962750889
Altina Hoti is co-director of the NEH funded project, English-language translation and critical edition of Francesco Emanuele Cangiamila’s Embriologia Sacra (1745). Hoti has a PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, where her dissertation examined nineteenth-century feminism and nationalism in Italy and the Balkans. Hoti translates texts to and from Albanian, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, and Latin. She is located in beautiful Tubingen, Germany.
Elizabeth O'Brien is an Assistant Professor of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Her book project is based on her 2019 doctoral dissertation, which was entitled “Intimate Interventions: The Cultural Politics of Reproductive Surgery in Mexico, 1790-1940.” The book undertakes three main lines of inquiry: first, it analyzes how Catholic theologies of personhood have influenced—and been influenced by—modern medical ideas about pregnancy and reproduction; second, it reveals how racial prejudice has affected Mexican obstetric training and clinical practice; and third, it explores how historians can uncover experiential and embodied histories in Mexico’s rich medical archives.