Seth Kimmel studies the literatures and cultures of medieval and early modern Iberia. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010. Before joining Columbia’s Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures in 2012, Seth spent two years as a member of Stanford University’s Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities. His first book, Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2015, is an intellectual history of New Christian assimilation in the sixteenth century. His new book project studies the relationship between cartography and bibliography in the early modern period and, more generally, the impossible dream of acquiring and organizing universal knowledge. Sponsors: the Department of Literature, Middle Eastern Studies Program, Program for the Study of Religion, History and Hickel Endowed Chair