In an effort to renew its commitment to in-depth research and educational collaboration with Mexico, Harvard University established the Eduardo Matos Moctezuma Lecture Series in 2017. This series celebrates the excellence of Mexican archaeology and history, represented by Professor Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, Mexico’s preeminent archaeologist, who delivered the inaugural addresses in both Cambridge and Mexico City. In 2018, Alfredo López Austin delivered the lecture in Eduardo’s honor. The Fall 2019 Lecture will be delivered by Dr. Diana Magaloni, Deputy Director, Director of Conservation, and Program Director and Dr. Virginia Fields Curator of the Art of the Ancient Americas at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The lecture, “El Códice Florentino y la Creación del Nuevo Mundo” (The Florentine Codex and the Creation of the New World), will be held on Tuesday, October 8th, at 7 p.m. local time (8 p.m. EST) at the Jaime Torres Bodet Auditorium at Mexico’s Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City. The event is free and open to the public and will be live-streamed for those unable to attend. Diana Magaloni is a renowned art historian, author, curator, and conservator. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History from Yale University, an M.A. in Art History from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and a B.A. in Conservation from the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH). She was formerly the Director of the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City (2009-13) and has served as researcher and professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at UNAM since 1991. Her research has focused on developing methodologies to understand the originality of the artistic and aesthetic processes of ancient indigenous cultures in the Americas. She has published extensively, including the books Colors of the New World: Materials, Artists, and the Creation of the Florentine Codex (2014) and Albores de la Conquista (2017), which won the INAH’s Antonio García Cubas award for outstanding publications in anthropology and history. She has curated numerous exhibitions, including Picasso & Rivera: Conversations Across Time (LACMA and Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, 2017), which received the 2018 Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators. The Eduardo Matos Moctezuma Lecture Series is made possible through the generosity of José Antonio Alonso Espinosa and the initiative of Davíd Carrasco, Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America at Harvard University with a joint appointment at Harvard Divinity School and the Department of Anthropology of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. This is the first lecture series named after a Mexican in Harvard’s nearly 400-year history and is the product of almost four decades of close collaboration between professors Matos and Carrasco on the excavation and research projects surrounding the Templo Mayor at Tenochtitlan. The Lecture Series comes out of a collaboration among the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Harvard Divinity School, and the Moses Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project at Harvard University. Harvard has received invaluable support for the Matos Moctezuma Lecture Series from Mexico’s Ministry of Culture, through the National Institute of Anthropology and History, the National Museum of Anthropology, and the Templo Mayor Museum. A breath-taking painting by Mexican-American artist George Yepes titled “El Guerrero Águila,” commissioned especially for the Matos Lecture Series, serves as the visual identity for the series. Professor Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, as well as a distinguished Harvard delegation led by Claudine Gay, Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; Jane Pickering, Director of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology; and David Hempton, Dean of the Harvard Divinity School, will be in attendance at the lecture.
September 18, 2019