Resumen de José Emilio Burucúa interviewed by Claudio E. Benzecry
osé Emilio “Gastón” Burucúa is professor of cultural history at the National University of San Martín in Buenos Aires (fig. 1). In his work, Burucúa draws on the Warburgian tradition in art history to explore the complex intersections of art and science, from Renaissance Europe to the New World. He has produced rigorous scholarship on the history of European early modernity, as well as analyzed Argentinean and Hispano-American art history. The name of the journal he edits, Eadem utraque Europa (Europe Both and the Same), summarizes his intellectual project well: to understand European modernity, its conflicts and contradictions, in relation to Latin America as well as to its own past. He has been central to the modernization of the local historiographical field in Argentina, presiding over curricular changes at the University of Buenos Aires during the 1980s, as well as to related fields like art history and conservation. Taller de Restauración de Arte, the conservation institute he directs, has restored over two hundred works of art since 2004. His major books are Corderos y elefantes: La sacralidad y la risa en la modernidad clásica, siglos XV a XVII (Lambs and Elephants: Sacredness and Laughter in Classical Modernity, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries; 2001) and Historia, arte, cultura: De Aby Warburg a Carlo Ginzburg (History, Art, Culture: From Aby Warburg to Carlo Ginzburg; 2003). More recently, he published El mito de Ulises en el mundo moderno (The Myth of Ulysses in the Modern Era; 2013), for which he received the national award for art history essays published in Argentina during the years 2010–14, and “Cómo sucedieron estas cosas”: Representar masacres y genocidios (“How These Things Came About”: Representing Massacre and Genocide) (2014), written in collaboration with Nicolás Kwiatkowski
