Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature
School of Humanities

Colonial Mexico, Mesoamerican Studies, Visual Culture, Antiquarianism, Early Modern Iberia

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Moorman-Simon Early Career Professorship at Boston University (2020-2022)

I am a comparatist and interdisciplinary scholar of early Mexico with degrees in Latin American and Iberian studies (Columbia) and philosophy (Leuven), and an academic background in literature and visual studies (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz). My work cuts across traditional fields and media, as I'm drawn to intellectual problems that challenge clean-cut periodizations, geographies of knowledge, and discipline-bound methodologies. I am particularly interested in the intersections of early modern antiquarianism, political theology, and hermeneutics, and the role of indigenous intellectuals in the production of knowledge about the past.

In this spirit, I have explored the conditions of historical visibility and the political theology of the Aztec gods in early sixteenth-century historiography ("Taming Teotl"); probed into the political iconology of the foundational plan of Mexico-Tenochtitlan printed in Nuremberg in 1524 ("Nueva España Figurada"); studied the emergence of a vernacular sacred antiquarianism and a visual archaeology of monotheism in sixteenth-century New Spanish codices and Italian antiquarian treatises ("Biblias de solas figuras", "Aztec Monotheism"); and examined the rediscovery of Nahua poetics in the nineteenth century in Mexico and the US ("Postreros acentos") and its meta-translation into Western forms of temporality ("Su herencia fue el llanto"). These studies share a general hermeneutical approach, premised on an awareness of the contingency of the junctures and turning points through which dominant forms of discursivity, knowledge, and even historical positivity are established. I understand hermeneutics as a process of reverse-engineering, deft at disclosing the ways in which critical common sense, successful categories of interpretation, and even social facts emerge.
And if a hermeneutical attitude gravitates towards foundational moments, anomalies and one-offs (hapax legomena) in the archive, I am equally interested in the afterlives of constructed meanings that persist through historical discontinuity. In this sense, I have written about the emergence of Mexican literature in the margins of the colonial archive ("Bibliographic Muse"), and the appearance of Baroque anamorphism in the works of twentieth-century Marxist Mexican writer José Revueltas ("Estruendos de la mirada").

I grew up in the city of Oaxaca, Mexico, and completed my undergraduate studies in Puebla, Mexico. I hold degrees in Philosophy (MA, KU Leuven) and Latin American and Iberian Studies (PhD, Columbia). During 2015-16, I was a fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max Planck Institute and the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Prior to coming to UCI, I was the Moorman-Simon assistant professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Boston University. My research has also been supported by the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, RI, and Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC.

David Horacio Colmenares (2025), “Tenochtitlán figurada: Nuevas hipótesis sobre el plano-mapa de Núremberg, 1524.” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, forthcoming

David Horacio Colmenares (2025), "Estruendos de la mirada: José Revueltas y la anamorfosis." Nuevas Poligrafías. Revista de Teoría Literaria y Literatura Comparada (11), 105–129.

"'Biblias de solas figuras': el Códice Vaticano A y el anticuarismo vernáculo novohispano," in Codex Vaticanus 3738: edición facsimilar, Biblioteca Apostólica Vaticana y Universidad Nacional de México, forthcoming.

David Horacio Colmenares (2021) “‘Su herencia fue el llanto.’ Pathos, memoria y condensación temporal en los Cantares mexicanos.” Colonial Latin American Review, 30: 1, 3-24

David Horacio Colmenares, “The Bibliographic Muse: Mexican Literature and the Colonial Archive” in a A History of the Mexican Novel (ed. by I. Sánchez Prado, A. M. Nogar and J. R. Ruisánchez), Cambridge University Press, forthcoming

David Horacio Colmenares, “‘Postreros acentos de la lira indiana’: the Protracted Literary Discovery of the Cantares Mexicanos in the 19th Century,”Hispanic American Historical Review (2022) 102 (3): 415–448.

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https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=7133

Last updated
04/16/2025