ALAA Summer Book Launch Event - The Aquatic Metropolis

The inaugural program in the 2026 ALAA Summer Book Launch Series, featuring the book The Aquatic Metropolis: Urban Design and Environmental Change in Tenochtitlan-Mexico City by John López (UC Davis), who is in conversation with art historian Barbara Mundy (Tulane) and cultural studies scholar Ricardo Padrón (UVA). Originally recorded on June 26, 2026, and hosted by the Association for Latin American Art (ALAA). For more about The Aquatic Metropolis: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles... Participant Bios: John F. López is associate professor in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Davis. He holds a Ph.D. in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art program from MIT. His research centers on a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to scrutinizing the visual, material, and spatial practices between Europe and Latin America in the early modern period. In addition to his monograph, The Aquatic Metropolis: Urban Design and Environmental Change in Tenochtitlan-Mexico City, López is the editor to Brill’s A Companion to Viceregal Mexico City, 1519–1821. His scholarship has appeared in Art and Ecology, Ethnohistory, Journal of Latin American Geography, and Grove Art Online, among other venues. López’s research has been supported by the NEH, SSRC, ACLS, SAH, Fulbright-García Robles, the University of Chicago, and the University of California Hellman Society. Barbara E. Mundy is an art historian best known for her work on the history of cartography, urban history and the history of the book. Her work focuses primarily on Mexico and New Spain, and the interactions between Indigenous peoples, settler colonists and their environments across the colonial period, roughly 1520-1800. With her first book, The Mapping of New Spain: The Maps of the Relaciones Geograficas, she brought to light the largely overlooked colonial mapping traditions of the native peoples of Mexico. Her recent prizewinning book, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City, chronicles the great urban metropolis of Mexico City, to reveal the Indigenous foundation that lies beneath one of the largest cities in the world, past and present. Mundy holds the Robertson Chair in Latin American Art History at Tulane University. Ricardo Padrón is Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia, where he studies and teaches the literature and culture of the early modern Hispanic world. His research on space and empire in the maps and writing of the period has produced two monographs, The Spacious Word (2004) and The Indies of the Setting Sun (2020), both from the University of Chicago Press. He as served on the governing board of the Renaissance Society of America and is the founding president of the Society for Early Transpacific Studies. To become a member of ALAA: https://www.associationlatinamericana...