Seth Kimmel studies the literatures and cultures of medieval and early modern Iberia. He earned his B.A. in Comparative Literature and Religion here at Columbia and 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. During the 2018-2019 academic year, Seth was the John Elliott Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.
Seth’s first book, Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain (University of Chicago Press, 2015), is an intellectual history of New Christian assimilation in the sixteenth century. It won the American Comparative Literature Association’s 2017 Harry Levin Prize for best first book published in the field of Comparative Literature. A new book project studies the relationship between cosmography and bibliography in the early modern period and, more generally, the impossible dream of acquiring and organizing universal knowledge. In addition to the history of science, the history of the book, and what we might call “multiconfessional Iberia,” other research and teaching interests include Mediterranean studies and theories of secularism and religion.
