Karen Melvin
Thomas Hedley Reynolds Professor of History
About
B.A., Boston University; Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
BIOGRAPHY
I鈥檓 a scholar of colonial Mexico and the early modern Catholic world. I鈥檓 currently finishing a book about two of the first international charities: rescuing Christian captives from North Africa and maintaining a Catholic presence in the Holy Land. During the seventeenth through early-nineteenth centuries, New Spain provided more funds for these projects than anywhere else in the world, and I want to know what people there knew about these projects and why they might have cared. I’m also starting a new book project that follows the travels of Irish Dominican William 鈥淕uillermo鈥� O’Brien to Rome, New York City, Havana, and Mexico City in order to show how movement through the Catholic empire around the turn of the nineteenth century helped shape our modern world.
My publications include:
- : Mendicant Orders and Urban Culture in New Spain, 1570-1800. Stanford University Press, 2012
- 听: Essays on Methods and Practice. Co-edited with Sylvia Sellers-Garc铆a, University of New Mexico Press, 2017
- Other articles and book chapters can be found.
- I鈥檓 also a principal investigator for, a collaborative digital history project that presents inquisition cases as original documents, Spanish transcriptions, and English translations.
TEACHING
My teaching encompasses a wide range of Latin America鈥檚 history from Aztecs to the present day, including courses open to all students:
HIST/LALS 181 Creating Latin America: A broad overview of Latin America from indigenous societies before the arrival of Europeans through 21st-century globalization.
HIST 214/LALS 215 Revolutionary Americas, 1765-1830: Professor Joe Hall and I team teach this class that examines struggles for independence throughout the American hemisphere, from Boston to Buenos Aires.听
HIST/LALS 270 The Spanish Empire: From Madrid to Manila: A history of early globalization through the lens of the first global empire.
HIST 295 / LALS 295 / REL 295听 Montezuma鈥檚 Mexico: Aztecs and their World: Students learn about what life was like for people in the Aztec empire and beliefs about how the cosmos worked.听听
HIST/LALS s27: The Mexican Revolution: Students debate issues from the first major social revolution of the 20th-century.听听
听I also offer smaller seminar classes for sophomores, juniors, and seniors, including:
HIST 301Y / LALS 303 / REL 314 The Spanish Inquisition: Students use Inquisition cases鈥攊ncluding for blasphemy, bigamy, and witchcraft鈥攖o better understand peoples and societies of Spain and New Spain.
HIST 301W/LALS301W: The Cold War in Latin America: Students research how revolutions, military coups and governments, wide-scale human rights violations, and civil wars shaped the region between the 1950s and the 1980s.