Lauren Beck
Biography
Dr. Lauren Beck specializes in the visual culture of the early-modern Atlantic world, with interests in place identity and marginalized voices. She holds the Canada Research Chair in Intercultural Encounter and is a Professor of Visual & Material Culture Studies at 91鶹 and editor of The Cultural History of Exploration. Her recent publications include Canada’s Place Names and How to Change Them (Concordia University Press, 2022) and, with M. Augustine, Mitji: Let’s Eat! Mi’kmaq Recipes from Sikniktuk (Nimbus Press, 2024. Her articles have appeared in several journals, including most recently Renaissance Quarterly and Journal of Women's History. She currently holds several external grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada History Fund, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
Publications
Publications
1. Recent public scholarship:
"Canada Is Haunted by Problematic Names." Op-ed for the Globe & Mail, January 2024.
Database of Municipal Place Name Policy of Canada, 2023-present,
Identity in Canada’s Place Name Policy: A Knowledge Synthesis. White paper for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, 2023.
"Women Are Vastly Underrepresented in Canada’s Place Names." Op-ed for The Conversation, November 2022.
2. Select books and special journal issues:
El español en Canadá, with Y. Iglesias. Instituto Cervantes, forthcoming.
, with G. Chacón and J. Sánchez. Amherst College Press, 2024
, with M. Augustine. Nimbus Press, 2024.
The Cultural History of Exploration [6 vols.]. Series editor. Bloomsbury Press, 2024.
. Concordia University Press, 2022.
The Social Lives of Maps [3 vols.], Material Culture Review 92-94 (2022 and 2023).
Illustrating the Cid. Queens-McGill University Press, 2019.
Firsting in the Early Modern Transatlantic World, Routledge, 2019.
Visualizing the Text: From Manuscript Culture to Caricature . Co-edited with C. Ionescu. University of Delaware Press, 2017.
Canada before Confederation: Maps from the Exhibition. Co-authored with C. Van Duzer. Vernon Press, 2017.
Women in the History of Cartography, Discovery, and Exploration , Terrae Incognitae 48.1 (2016).
Small Communities, co-edited with C. Ionescu, Journal of New Brunswick Studies 6.1 (2015).
Mapping North America: Early Modern Narratives of Discovery and Exploration in the Davidson Collection. Catalogue compiled with C. Ionescu. 91鶹, 2015.
Transforming the Enemy in Spanish Culture: The Conquest through the Lens of Visual and Textual Multiplicity. Cambria Press, 2013.
3. Recent book chapters:
"Unsettling Spanish Atlantic History: Toward a Scholarship Invested in Visual and Material Culture," in Firsting in the Early-Modern Transatlantic World ed. L. Beck. Routledge, 2019.
"Firsting: The Architecture of Decolonizing Scholarship on the Early-Modern Transatlantic World," in Firsting in the Early-Modern Transatlantic World, ed. L. Beck. Routledge, 2019.
"El Paso Noroeste según las fuentes indígenas utilizadas en mapas ingleses y franceses antes del año 1800," [The Northwest Passage according to Indigenous Sources Used on English and French Maps before 1800] in Enigmas de las Américas , vol. 2: Un paso interoceánico , ed. S. Guerra Moscoso. Universidad San Francisco de Quito, 2019.
"Annotation and Books in Early Modern Spanish Painting," in Visualizing the Text: From Manuscript Culture to Caricature, eds. L. Beck and C. Ionescu. University of Delaware Press, 2017, 71-93.
"Eighteenth-century Spanish American Terra Incognita: Mapping the Things of Empire," in Eighteenth -Century Thing Theory in a Global Context: From Consumerism to Celebrity Culture, eds. I. Baird and C. Ionescu. Ashgate, 2014, 227-245.
"Illustrating the Spanish Conquest in the Long Eighteenth Century: Theodore de Bry and his Legacy," in Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century: Reconfiguring the Visual Periphery of the Text, ed. C. Ionescu. Cambridge Scholarly Press, 2011, 494-533.
4. Recent articles:
"Spanishness and Race in North American Monumental Architecture,"/Arts/ 13 (2024), 1-21.
"Material Ways of Looking: A Methodological Proposal for Visual and Material Culture Studies,"Material Culture Review 96 (2023), 29-46.
"Beads and Ceremony: The Collision of Pan-American, European, African, and Asian Bead Networks in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Empire," Religion14 (2023), 1-19.
"Resistance, Protest, and Knowledge: Indigenous Appropriation of Medievalism in Ibero and Latin America," Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 46.1 (2021), 57-80.
"The Persistence of Early-Modern Metadata in Online Environments and the Endurance of Imperial Discourse," HumanÍstica 90 (2021).
"Euro-Settler Place Naming Practices for North America through a Gendered and Racialized Lens," Terrae Incognitae 53.1 (2021), 5-25.
"Civilizing the Pre-Modern Spanish World through the Gaze of Modernity," Pleyade 23 (2019), 101-124.
"Race and Labour in Sixteenth-Century Seville through the Prism of Accounting Books (Hijuelas) from the Reales Alcázares," Renaissance Quarterly 71.4 (2018), 1272-1297.
"Women's Power and Material Exchange in Early Modern Transatlantic Spain," Journal of Women's History 30.1 (2018), 35-55.
"La fundación de pueblos españoles e indígenas en el siglo XVI," [Indigenous and Spanish Townfounding in the Sixteenth Century] Del mundo al mapa y del mapa al mundo: Objetos, escalas e imaginarios del territorio. Memorias del 6º Simposio Iberoamericano de Historia de la Cartografía-, ed. A. Vega Palma (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2017), 223-232.
" -" Journal of New Brunswick Studies 7.1 (2016), 15-36.
" -" - Image and Narrative 17.1 (2016), 5-14.
"The Travelogue of a Moroccan Ambassador to Charles II, 1690-1691," -Journal of North African Studies 20.2 (2015), 284-302.
- " Terrae Incognitae 45.1 (2013), 2-18.
"-" Revista de Historia Actual 29 (2012), 93-106.