#SeniorSeminar: Alejandro Valdivia and “Enemies, Memories, and the Orient in Italian Renaissance Thought”

I am from Weston, Florida, but my family is originally from Peru. When I was younger, we went back regularly to visit family. My grandfather taught history in high school and university, and it was he who stimulated my interest in history. Already when I was five years old, he told me stories, about the Incas of course, but also history more generally. History was important for me all the way through school. I came to FSU via Seminole Pathways as an International Affairs major but changed it to a dual degree with History as the major of my second degree. I am planning on graduating in spring 2026.

My favorite time in history is late antiquity and early Middle Ages, especially in the eastern Mediterranean, Europe, and Middle East. This means I have worked with both Dr. Dodds and Dr. Palmer a lot. Dr. Dodds is helping me find graduate programs which specialize in those areas. If I stay with History, my goal is to become a scholar. With a minor in Museum Studies, I am also considering jobs in public history.

I have taken a few classes with Dr. Palmer over the last few semesters. We got to know each other quite well, and he made me aware of his fall senior seminar. The title of the class was The Italian Renaissance.

My initial research question had focused on reactions to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Then I got sidetracked by the two opposing narratives on Greeks during this period – they were both appreciated and despised at the same time, and I was curious how and why the negative story disappeared by the 16th century.

Eventually, the project I designed for myself was on the question of whether there existed a humanist notion of orientalism. I wanted to find out whether Italian humanist scholars used Orientalizing rhetoric about the Greeks and the Ottoman Turks deliberately. I investigated how humanist scholars created an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ construct that considered all lands of the eastern Mediterranean to be home to barbaric others.

Although the study of Greece is nowadays seen as an integral part of the Western canon, Greeks were not always admired in the West; indeed during the Middle Ages they were hated by Christians in the West. By the late Middle Ages, Westerners began to think of Byzantium as a part of the same opposing cultural space occupied by the Ottomans and other Islamic powers. But while the Ottoman Turks remained the eastern other, the Greeks were rehabilitated over time. I was interested in how the Byzantine Greek humanists who came to Italy asking for aid against the Ottomans were able to change the West’s negative narrative.

This is a field of history that is currently very active. Scholars are debating whether we can apply the notion of ‘Orientalizing’ to actors from a non-modern period. Not that much has been published, and Dr. Palmer introduced me to colleagues who helped me with gathering primary and secondary sources. While I know some Latin, I had to rely on translated material for the most part.

I started my research by reviewing what was available on JSTOR, but what I found was limited. Maybe a handful of primary and some secondary sources. That’s when I realized I had to ask for help, and Dr. Palmer put me in touch with a colleague from Western Carolina University who was working on the topic. He sent me a list of possible sources, mainly material that I as an undergraduate might not have thought about. That helped me identify several very useful monographs and find some more primary material.

I was surprised by the contemporary scholarly debates over historical interpretations and how that played out in academic literature. One of the first books I read stated that many humanists genuinely believed the Turks to be Trojans and meant that as a very specific negative label. I wrote my paper based on that argument. Then I discovered that this hypothesis was under discussion and not universally shared by scholars today. In the end, I wrote that whether the humanists believed them to be Trojans or not, they used the label to create an eastern other with their rhetoric.

One of the things I had to learn was to juggle all my commitments this semester and learn how to read strategically. I did not have that many primary sources to work with, but there were a number of monographs. I worked on reading efficiently so that I got all the information I needed. I used Post-it notes to write down all the things that helped me support my argument. By the end, I had 15 books on my desk which all had sticky notes poking out from them!

I worked in bursts. Typically, I would spend a few hours doing research, taking notes, condensing information. And the next day, I would write the section I had researched. Sometimes, I did both on the same day. Those were long days. Dr. Palmer had four checkpoints during the semester when we needed to hand in material. We had to submit a primary source review, a thesis statement, about six to eight pages of writing, and finally the completed rough draft. While the run-up to these deadlines was stressful, I am grateful that we had them as they held me accountable. My senior seminar thesis ended up 24 pages long.

The presentation presented its own challenges! I had not realized how difficult it would be to condense my argument into a ten-minute time slot. Since my paper had two parts, I asked for five minutes plus five minutes. If I am honest, I could have been better prepared for presenting – but I was told that I communicated my arguments successfully.

Everyone in the senior seminar had a peer partner. We were grouped together based on our research focus. My partner was working on crusading ideology and literature in the Renaissance, and we were often using the same sources. That meant that exchanging information and ideas was easy for us. We reviewed each other’s assignments throughout the semester, and after the presentation was done, we wrote a short review of our partner’s paper. Those comments and reviews were very helpful. I am very grateful for the insights I got from my partner.

I have three pieces of advice for other History majors about to start their senior seminar:

• Start your research as early as possible.
• Choose a topic you like, because once the pressure is on, the thing that will keep you going is passion. If you are not enthusiastic about what you are researching, the class will be very hard.
• Don’t be afraid to ask for help. If I had asked for help in my quest for sources a bit earlier, I would have been less stressed about meeting the required number of sources.

What is coming up for me next? I will start my Honors in the Major project in spring 2025. I will work with Dr. Dodds on crusading ideologies in medieval Spain. I am planning on going to Spain in the summer for research. I can’t wait to do more research; when I started at FSU, I participated in UROP, I will take the next semesters to complete a HITM project.