Dr. Carmen Channing

I am a historian of the Americas in the early modern period. I have a MSt in History from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaiso, Chile and a PhD in History from the University of Edinburgh, UK. As a Latin American and Chilean researcher, I am interested in the connections between America and Europe and the fabric of those connections. More specifically, I focus on those territories that were seen by Europe as "peripheries" and their relationship with the "centre". My doctoral thesis, "Imagined peripheries: English visions of Patagonia (1527-1694)" challenges the assumption that "peripheries", such as Patagonia, did not have a major impact on the way early modern empires conceived their expansion. On the contrary, Patagonia activated England's imagination of the Americas and the colonial opportunities that existed in the South Sea. My areas of interest are maritime history, cultural history, imagined geographies and most recently in the history of science. My research project for T@T, "The South Sea in the Scientific Revolution: Global connections, cultural encounters, colonial science and networks of knowledge (1600-1700)", aims to study how the interactions between European and South Sea societies gave rise to novel and local forms of science -“colonial science”- in the early modern period. I firmly believe that academic research goes hand in hand with teaching. In Chile, I was a tutor for the History of Latin America I and II (1500-1700)  and in Edinburgh I was a tutor for Early Modern History: A Connected World and The Historian's Toolkit. Now at Tuebingen I will be teaching "Imagined Geographies" and "Colonial Science".

Peer-Reviewed Publications

• “El diario de John Narborough (1694): conocimiento útil e instrumento para la navegación del estrecho de Magallanes”. Book chapter Iommi, Virginia; Fontaine, Amparo y Urbina, Ximena (eds.). Instrumentos modernos: objetos, usos y transformaciones (siglos XVI-XVIII). Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaíso, Valparaíso, 2023, pp. 51–76.
• Co-authorship with J. Serrano. “Liberate America from the tyrannical Spain: imaginary or project? Dutch expeditions to Chile (1599-1642)”, Historia 396, Vol. 10 N°2, 2020, 85-114.
• Co-authorship with X. Urbina. “The English corsair George Shelvocke in Chiloé, 1719", Fogón, Vol 1, Nº 2, 2018, pp. 27-39.
• "La intertextualidad en El Carnero de Juan Rodríguez Freyle: escándalo y pecadores en Nueva Granada (1636-1638)", Intus-Legere Historia, Vol. 9, N° 2, 2015, pp. 39-58.

Peer-reviewed papers to be set to print

• El Estrecho de Magallanes antes de Drake: producción de conocimiento del Estrecho de Magallanes en Inglaterra (1520-1578) in  García Redondo, José María and Pajuelo Moreno, Vicente (eds.). “Toda la redondez de la Tierra”. Ciencia y experiencia de la primera circunnavegación, Ediciones Universidad de Barcelona, Barcelona, to be published in 2024.