During the past eight weeks, I worked with professors Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Michael Aronna on preparing the first volume of the Oviedo Project for publication. This is a long-term and large-scale project, spanning several years of translation work by other students (including other Ford scholars) of the thousands of pages of writings produced by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo about the New World in his Historia General y Natural de las Indias (General and Natural History of the Indies). After many semesters of translating, editing, and revising, the first volume has been accepted for publication by Brill!

In order to finalize this first volume, I helped research and write footnotes for some of the volume’s early books. We first had to come up with a footnoting methodology, deciding which historical figures, places, mythological figures, and other references would be footnoted. We also had to decide a general pattern for the footnotes—how extensive they would be, and which format they would use. Because of the scale of the project and the extensiveness of our footnoting, we created a spreadsheet to keep track of our completed progress. I worked specifically on footnoting books two and four, which I completed. Each book contained numerous chapters. I periodically shared and discussed my work with my professors to ensure our agreement on the final footnotes, adding or removing any information we found necessary or irrelevant. Additionally, we combed through these books for small, final edits, such as the removal of contractions and ensuring the clarity of all translations. 

In total, we finished editing about four of the nineteen books in the first volume. The volume should be ready to send to Brill by the end of February. It has been a pleasure and an honor to add my contributions to this incredible project!