17 October 2025 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100

Kelly McDonough (UT Spanish & Portuguese)

“Embodied, Predictive, and Didactic: Nahua Science in Book XI of the Florentine Codex”

As the only Nahua natural history produced during the colonial period, Book XI of the Florentine Codex, entitled “Earthly Things,” is an unparalleled register of sixteenth-century Indigenous science, or “ways of knowing and explaining the world.” The result of a decades-long collaboration between elite-class male Nahua scholars and elders, and a Franciscan friar, Book XI offers rare insight into Nahua engagement with, and understandings of, the environment they inhabited in the Central Valley of Mexico. In my presentation, I analyze sixteenth-century Nahua science through a focus on Nahua principles, methods, and rationales of scientific investigation, as well as modes of communication related to scientific knowledge production, gathering, and dissemination. From this analysis, I argue that Nahua science in Book XI was 1) based on a blend of first-hand, embodied experiences and ancient authority; 2) concerned with predicting and influencing future outcomes; and 3) used to model an ethical framework that would ensure survival in an interconnected world.

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Kelly McDonough is the Tomás Rivera Regents Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the author most recently of Indigenous Science and Technology: Nahuas and the World Around Them (Univ. of Arizona Press, 2024).

19 September 2025 —12:00 noon — GAR 4.100

Jana Weiss (UT Germanic Studies)

“Barrels of Knowledge: The Transatlantic Circulation of Scientific Brewing in 19th-Century America”

Jana Weiss writes:

This talk presents a draft chapter from my second book, focusing on the lager
beer revolution in the United States. Brewing is one of the oldest and most
widely used technologies. Many of its key discoveries took decades, some even
hundreds of years. The nineteenth century was the Belle Époque of brewing
professionalization as the sharing of beer practices evolved from (informal)
personal experience and sometimes clandestine exchanges to an open knowledge
transfer, primarily through trade journals and formal training.During this
time, German Americans took over the U.S. beer industry. As brewers and
brewing scientists transferred European technologies and skills across the
Atlantic, they eventually (re)invented a new beer style, American-style lager,
though not without setbacks. My presentation zooms in on the role of the
United States Brewers Association and its flagship publication, Der
Amerikanische Bierbrauer, in disseminating scientific advances but also
failures.
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Jana Weiss is DAAD Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
She focuses on U.S. and transatlantic history, in particular immigration,
racism, knowledge, and religious history. After studying at the University of
Bremen, she received her PhD in 2013 at the University of Münster with a study
on the role of civil religion in U.S.-American patriotic holidays after 1945
(Fly the Flag and Give Thanks to God. Zivilreligion an US-amerikanischen
patriotischen Feiertagen, 1945-1992, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2015).
Jana is currently working on her second book titled A Lager Beer Revolution:
German American Brewers in Pre-Prohibition USA, analyzing the cultural and
technological transfer of the “German art of brewing” to the United States.
Her research has been generously funded by the German Research Foundation
(DFG), the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the German Historical
Institute in Washington, D.C.