The discovery of the ‘New World’ is one of the standard reference points for de ning ‘modernity’ from a European perspective. It is also a historical event that has had manifest repercussions for the interaction of human cultures around the globe. This symposium will provide the opportunity for a comparative inquiry into the ways in which key aspects of the conquest and colonisation of Latin America by Europeans have been represented and transmitted in writing, in visual culture, and in performance culture down the cen- turies and across a range of national cultures.

Two keynote speakers will provide the symposium with perspectives that run beyond the European. Dr Stefanie Gänger (Assistant Professor at Cologne University) is the author of Relics of the Past. The Collecting and Studying of Pre-Columbian Antiquities in Peru and Chile, 1837–1911 (2014), and she will be speaking on the historical constraints on understanding the native cultures of Latin America through archaeology and ethnography. Professor João Cezar de Castro Rocha (Rio de Janeiro) is President of the Brazilian Association of Comparative Literature. His latest book is Shakespearean Cultures. The Challenge of Mimesis (forthcoming 2017), and he will speak on the role that re ections of European traditions have played within the develop- ment of Latin American cultures.