January 23, 2012 — Coral Gables — To mark the 500th anniversary of Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León’s landing on the shores of Florida, the University of Miami Center for Humanities will host “Florida at the Crossroads: Five Hundred Years of Encounters, Conflicts, and Exchanges” from February 9-11. Twenty-seven distinguished experts from Florida, around the United States, and Spain will offer thought-provoking dialogue revisiting the past, heeding the present, and envisioning the future of Florida as a crossroads of peoples, quests, and exchanges. Conference activities are open to the public free of charge and will take place on UM’s Coral Gables campus.
The conference is supported by a generous grant from the Florida Humanities Council awarded to the Center for the Humanities and to project director Viviana Díaz Balsera, of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures.
The event will open on Thursday, February 9 with a keynote address by distinguished colonialist Raquel Chang-Rodríguez (Graduate Center and City College, City University of New York) on the chronicles describing the early European contact with the indigenous population of La Florida. On Friday, February 10 and Saturday, February 11 scholars from anthropology, archaeology, art history, geography, history, Latin American studies, literature, political science, sociology, Spanish literature, and urban studies will discuss Florida’s past, present, and future. Friday evening, renowned expert on immigration and ethnicity Alex Stepick (Florida International University) will give the second keynote address “Florida: Still on the Edge?” The conference will close Saturday evening with a dramatic reading of “Hail, God of Seeds!” by seventeenth-century Spanish colonial poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, set to period music performed by instrumentalists and choral ensemble.
Admission to all conference activities is free and open to the public. Registration is required. For further information on the events and to register, visit humanities.miami.edu/symposia/florida500.
The College of Arts and Sciences Center for the Humanities at the University of Miami is dedicated to supporting humanities, arts, and interpretive social science research and teaching, as well as to presenting public programs to enrich Miami’s intellectual culture. For more information, call 305-284-1580, or visit www.humanities.miami.edu.
The grant from the Florida Humanities Council is part of their Viva Florida 500 program, commemorating the 500th year of Spain’s relationship with Florida.
