Material Girls and Imperial Fashions: The Circulation of Ideologies and Commerce in the Hispanic Enlightenment

In my dissertation I examine how and to what extent women's material culture functions in debates on utility and morality in encyclopedic texts from Spain and Spanish America. By "encyclopedic text" I am referring to works that follow certain parameters: a trend of collecting, organizing, and disseminating a broad knowledge base with explicit or implicit didactic aims. Encyclopedias are gold mines for political jabs and heated debates that were grounded in particular socio-economic circumstances.;The debate regarding women and material fashions is a far-reaching argument but the encyclopedia entries and histories I analyze are specifically located geographically. The scope of my project is trans-Atlantic and I employ this approach to uncover the ways in which the polemic on women's material culture is articulated in a Hispanic global eighteenth century.