Name: NAIS Faculty Talk: “Indigenous Science and Technology: Nahuas and the World Around Them”
Start: 2025-02-12T12:00:00-06:00
End: 2025-02-12T14:00:00-06:00
Location: Robert L. Patton (RLP) 1.302E | 305 E 23rd St Austin TX 78712

$NAIS Faculty Talk: \u201cIndigenous Science and Technology: Nahuas and the World Around Them\u201d$

The Program in Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) at UT Austin invites you to join us in celebrating Professor Kelly McDonough's recent book publication, entitled: “Indigenous Science and Technology: Nahuas and the World Around Them.”
Published by The University of Arizona Press in May 2024, Professor McDonough's book explores how Nahuas—native⁠ speakers of Nahuatl, the common language of the Aztec Empire and of more than 2.5 million Indigenous people today—have explored, understood, and explained the world around them in pre-invasion, colonial, and contemporary time periods. It addresses Nahua understanding of plants and animals, medicine and ways of healing, water and water control, alphabetic writing, and cartography. Interludes between the chapters offer short biographical sketches and interviews with contemporary Nahua scientists, artists, historians, and writers, accompanied by their photos. The book also includes more than twenty full-color images from sources including the Florentine Codex, a sixteenth-century collaboration between Indigenous and Spanish scholars considered the most comprehensive extant source on the pre-Hispanic and early colonial Aztec (Mexica) world.
Professor McDonough is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UT Austin and an active member of the NAIS affiliated faculty, serving on the NAIS Advisory Council since 2015. Her research centers primarily on the identification and analysis of how Nahuas in Mexico, produce, record, and disseminate knowledges. This broad research goal encompasses theories and methods of multiple disciplines and fields including Colonial Literary and Cultural Studies; Critical Indigenous Studies; Ethnohistory (Nahuatl Studies); Science and Technology Studies; and Digital Humanities. She is also the author of “The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico,” in which she presents case studies drawn from the past 500 years to show various forms of Nahua intellectual production, systematically debunking the erroneous racialized discourse that refused to see Nahuas as intellectuals.
Professor McDonough has also recently been involved in two collaborative digital humanities projects: the digitization of the Fondo Real de Cholula judicial archive in Mexico and, along with Dr. Albert Palacios (LLILAS-Benson), Dr. Patricia Murrieta-Flores (Lancaster University, UK), and Dr. Javier Pereda (Liverpool John Moores University, UK), as Co-PI for the "Unlocking the Colonial Archive: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for Indigenous and Spanish American Historical Collections" project.
We are thrilled to welcome Professor McDonough for this presentation on her new book, with discussion/Q&A to follow!
This event is free and open to all. Lunch will be provided - please RSVP here.
📍Location details:
🌟This event will be held in-person only.
🌟Robert L. Patton (RLP) Building 1.302E, within the Glickman Conference Center.
🌟305 E 23rd St Austin TX 78712
🌟 https://www.google.com/maps?client=safari&sca_esv=115fbc7a5c2d88aa&hl=en-us&output=search&q=patton+building&source=lnms&fbs=AEQNm0BQnt7zAbYc7pfb73NclYsnxkpQPr4nHmleWBq3XsBOwyWNhdobxaNoV4A3MhkMqf1T7i9RhrzJRghTi6esSLRro5qPvwc88b1pHbhGzH84ZzUYwEJ__MNkobLY_Io8Dtv0w5jbrMpSGtFtT_XfincnHU74fibfgpmI9sFdpYO67HaOEza0bE-AC_Bwow-U1Wkb76zEO5eGBrmIfM_jDs9_KRdGhFBUtGN9G41M2HpPR0Yqw60&entry=mc&ved=1t:200715&ictx=111
Funding support provided by the Braunagel-Brown Excellence Fund for Native American & Indigenous Studies