tgiFHI | Angelica Serna Jeri, Romance Studies
tgiFHI is a weekly series that gives Duke faculty in the humanities, interpretive social sciences and arts the opportunity to present their current research to their departmental and interdepartmental colleagues, students, and other interlocutors in their fields.
On January 30, 2026, we will host Angelica Serna Jeri, Assistant Professor of Romance Studies, for her lecture "Imaynataq wak'akuna kawsaynin kasqa, Ice, Water, and Wind in Andean Narratives."
This talk examines a corpus of late sixteenth-century Andean narratives, composed in Quechua, concerning the people of the highland province of Huarochirí in the central Peruvian Andes. By situating the manuscript within-and critically beyond-colonial regimes of knowledge and power, it argues that the archival inscription of Indigenous oral traditions both constrained and preserved environmental and territorial memory. The analysis reveals enduring Andean modes of relating to land and climate and the discursive forms of colonial power that sought-though often unsuccessfully-to repress them.
Angelica Serna Jeri is an assistant professor of Romance Studies at Duke University. She has a PhD in Romance Languages & Literatures from the University of Michigan. Her research and teaching reflect on the intertwined trajectories of material culture and written documents from Indigenous cultures in Latin America, with a particular focus on the Andean region. She works with diverse materials, including pre-Columbian ceramics, textiles, cartographic records, and narratives written by bilingual speakers of indigenous languages and Spanish. She is interested in how such materials can speak to a history of the land that centers on more than human experience.
tgiFHI events take place from 9:30-11:00 am on Friday mornings in the Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall (C105, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse) with breakfast at 9 am. Our director introduces at the speaker at 9:30 am, and the speaker gives a talk of about 45-50 minutes. We then open the floor for discussion, and close at 11:00 am.
Free Food and Beverages, Humanities, Lecture/Talk, Research