Department Chair and Professor Kevin Terraciano’s Florentine Codex Project Featured in Magazine Articles

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Department Chair and Professor Kevin Terraciano’s Florentine Codex project was recently featured in an online Winter 2024 edition of the UCLA Magazine and in El Pais in Spain.

Launched in October at a virtual symposium about online Indigenous language projects, the Digital Florentine Codex is the result of a $1.9 million project funded by the Getty Research Institute. The project involves a collaboration between the UCLA/Getty group and the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana to create an interactive web version of the manuscript, which will include introductory material, a glossary and labels of images to make it more approachable and useful for nonspecialist audiences.

The work included lining up a team that turned out to be impressively Bruin-powered, tapping into the longtime strength of Latin American studies at UCLA. Some of the team’s members had been trained by giants in the field, such as James Lockhart in history, H.B. Nicholson in anthropology and Cecilia Klein in art history; many were also already classmates, advisees or colleagues. Key participants included six UCLA doctoral alumni (Peterson, Richter and Terraciano; researchers Rebecca Dufendach Ph.D. ’17 and León García Garagarza ’03, Ph.D. ’10; and collaborating scholar Lisa Sousa ’90, M.A. ’92, Ph.D. ’98); a UCLA master’s alumna (project manager Alicia Maria Houtrouw M.A. ’08); and a former UCLA instructor of Nahuatl language (research consultant Eduardo de la Cruz Cruz).