Catherine Julien Receives NEH Grant

Catherine Julien Receives NEH Grant to Publish Exploration Documents

Catherine Julien and Pablo Pastrana-Pérez, faculty members of the History and Spanish Departments at Western, have been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to publish early documents related to exploration in the Americas. Julien and Pastrana will prepare the documents, all related to the exploration of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca up the Paraguay river to the largest wetland in the Americas, known today as the Pantanal, and written between 1543 and 1555. Cabeza de Vaca was also one of four survivors on an epic expedition across the southern part of the United States, from the Gulf Coast of Florida to the Pacific and then South to Mexico between 1527-35. On the basis of this trip he wrote a report that has come to be known as the Castaways, the most-published account of travel in the Americas because of its vivid account of survival against all odds. Cabreza de Vaca returned to Spain, but was too late to be awarded with the governorship of Florida, so he went back to the Americas as governor of the Río de la Plata Province, in 1540. Because he had been unable to make a record of exploration in North America, Cabeza de Vaca made a particular effort to record this second epic trip. The body of documents that Julien and Pastrana-Pérez will study may be the largest corpus of material produced by any exploration party during more than a century of European exploration in this hemiphere.

The grant of $100,000 from the Scholarly Editions Program of NEH is part of a research program that will result in the publication of two volumes in a hardcover boxed edition by the University of Nebraska Press. A number of activities related to the project have been programmed, including special sessions at next year’s Medieval Congress as well as graduate and undergraduate courses around the theme of the project. The funding will support a doctoral student associated with the project as well as the work by the two faculty members.

For more information, please contact Catherine Julien or Pablo Pastrana-Pérez.