Historian of race, gender, and law in colonial Latin America and the Iberian Atlantic
In the news
Author of Republics of Difference: Religious and Racial Self-Governance in the Spanish Atlantic World (Oxford University Press, 2022)
Winner of the 2022 Transatlantic Studies Association Book Prize
Citation: “Karen Graubart’s book is an extraordinary accomplishment of research and exposition. An exceptional contribution to studies of the cultures of the South Atlantic, it focuses on communities and self-governing groups to reveal everyday political and legal dynamics in the Spanish Atlantic world of the early modern period. Based on a wide range of multilingual research in numerous archives in Spain, Peru, and the United States, it systematically deploys imaginative and innovative methodology, including mapping technology, to fill blank spots in the documentary record. This sophisticated and intriguing work challenges pre-existing narratives and assumptions regarding colonial cultures in the early modern Atlantic world, and substantially re-sets the terms on which we understand these cultures and the people within them. By juxtaposing Christian and western perspectives with insights drawn from other frames of reference, and including the viewpoints of Jewish, Muslim, indigenous, and slave communities, Graubart’s study breaks new ground and succeeds in shifting the dominant Eurocentric premises of the critical heritage in this field.”
Buy it from Oxford University Press
Read my list of the “Five Most Surprising Histories of Gender in Colonial Latin America” here
and my top three books of the year here
Read my: With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru 1550-1700 (Stanford University Press, 2007)
Buy it from Stanford University Press or at Bookshop.org
Karen B. Graubart 