Support for Ben Franklin's world comes from the

Omaha Institute of Early American History and Culture.

Professor Allison Bigelow is a literary scholar

who studies Spanish colonial literature at the University of Virginia.

In 2016, she and University of Maryland Professor Ralph Bauer organized a conference called

Translation and Transmission in the Early Americas.

The conference brought together scholars from across many different disciplines in order to exchange ideas about how different peoples across the early Americas translated and transmitted ideas.

And to discuss how these scholars should translate and transmit those early American ideas in their articles, books, and classrooms.

Allison took some time to tell me about her conference why it was such a great experience and how the

O'Mohandro Institute helped make it possible.

So we had the conference in June of 2016

with about 150 people working on Latin America,

Spanish-speaking Latin America, Spanish speaking Latin America, Portuguese speaking

Latin America, Ketywaera Nahuatel, British North America, Wabonaki, Cherokee,

Musqui, Dutch speaking North America, German speaking, Pennsylvania, French Imperial, everything.

Something like the Translation Conference, it's focused around a central question,

is really good for allowing us to see where we overlap and

diverge in our fields. So I am a literary scholar and I would not have realized how

much my work right now is overlapping with art historians if we had not been at a conference like that.

Normally our conferences are organized by our disciplines.

So I show up at literary conferences and they show up at art history conferences and we often

don't speak to each other in a way that's productive.

...