MI Ph.D. Student Carlos Diego Arenas Pacheco Co-Organizes Virtual Conference on the Indigenous Reception of Aesop’s Fables

Carlos Diego Arenas Pacheco, a Ph.D. candidate at the Medieval Institute and a 2022 NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellow, organized the virtual public humanities conference “Narraciones Indígenas/Indigenous Storytelling: Tales and Aesop’s Fables in the Indigenous Americas”, which took place on April 28 & 29, 2022. The MI congratulates Carlos Diego Arenas Pacheco and the “Transformation of Classical Texts in the Middle Ages” Working Group on this accomplishment and celebrates how MI students and working groups connect academic topics in Medieval Studies with present-day issues of Indigenous representation in literature and academia.

“Narraciones Indígenas/Indigenous Storytelling” was co-sponsored by the Medieval Institute and Notre Dame International and supported by the Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (IIA-UNAM), and the Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí (UASLP). The conference was co-organized with Martin Bloomer (Notre Dame), Heréndira Téllez Nieto (UASLP), and Fernando Nava (IIA-UNAM). Carlos Diego Arenas Pacheco served as the speakers’ main contact and as the conference’s Zoom technician and English-Spanish simultaneous interpreter.

The conference featured Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, writers, and translators who have researched or translated Aesop’s Fables in Indigenous languages throughout the Americas. “Narraciones Indígenas/Indigenous Storytelling” promoted the work of representatives of the Huave, Nahua, Zapotec, and Mixe peoples from Mexico; of the Mvskoke, Dakota, and Potawatomi nations from the United States; and of the Quechua people of Bolivia.

Recordings of individual presentations will be available on the MI YouTube channel this summer.