Karen Graubart
Associate Professor of History
Field
Colonial Latin American History
Profile
Karen Graubart received her BA in Philosophy from Barnard College in 1984, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2000. She taught at the University of Massachusetts and at Cornell University before coming to Notre Dame in Fall 2007. Graubart’s main interests are early colonial Latin American social and economic history, with special focus on the construction of gender, ethnicity and race. Her book, With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru 1550-1700, was published by Stanford University Press in 2007.
Current Project
Graubart’s current project examines the historical sources for Iberians’ understanding of “Indians” in the New World by comparing the treatment of Muslim, Jewish and Sub-Saharan Africans under Christian rule in 15th century Seville, Spain with the establishment of colonial rule of indigenous peoples and Africans in 16th century Lima, Peru. Understanding the similarities and differences will provide new background for the formation of theories of racial and cultural difference, which became central to the construction of societies in Latin America. She has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for research on this project.
Teaching Interests
Colonial Latin American history, gender and race in Latin America, the history of the Andean region, perspectives on the “other” from Iberia to the New World.
Recent Publications
"The Creolization of the New World: Local Forms of Identity in Urban Colonial Peru, 1560-1640," Hispanic American Historical Revies (forthcoming, 2008).
With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru 1550-1700 (Stanford, 2007)
“De qadis y caciques,” Bulletin del Institut Français d’Etudes Andines, 37:1(2008).
“La moda colonial: aproximaciones a la etnicidad en dos ciudades peruanas coloniales,” in Tejiendo Sueños en el Cono Sur, ed. Victória Solanilla (Barcelona, Grup d’Estudis Precolombins, 2005): 295-302.
“Hybrid Thinking: Bringing Postcolonial Theory to Latin American Economic History,” in Postcolonial Thought and Economics, ed. S. Charusheela and Eiman Zein-Elabdin. Routledge, 2003.
Contact
Office: 475 Decio
Phone: 631-0377
Email: kgraubar@nd.edu
Office Hours: