Eduardo Dawson

I am currently a doctoral student at the University of Notre Dame where I study African subject formation in colonial Latin America. I am interested in the confrontation and/or comity this group experienced with the Catholic religion as an institutional body and as a site of transcendent spiritual intercourse. These revelations, I hope, will draw poignant insights into religion’s role in the body politic and how subjective and objective religious experiences strengthen or corrupt the nation-building project. As meta-narratives within this larger ensemble, I am intrigued by diasporic identity formation and how this can be analyzed to better understand the successes and failures of multicultural projects. It is fascinating to me how these ideas can be studied in an 'early modern' context while still bearing extraordinary relevance today as we all are affected/effected by dominant narratives, locating sites of solidarity, and grappling with 'the other' (as in, society's other).

I am originally from Portland, Oregon and received a B.A. in History & a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Oregon. I later obtained my M.A. in Hispanic Literature and Cultures at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Publications:
“Practical and Imaginative Speech in Guaman Poma’s El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno: El Negro within the Chronicler’s Social Reform and Utopic Agendas,” American Language Journal, Vol. 3, 1, 2019, 8-20, https://www.americanlanguagejournal.com/2019-vol-3-issue-1

Dawson, E. (2021, January 30) Ladinos and Bozales: A Brief Early History of Africans in Colombia: 1500-1800. Retrieved from https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/perspectives-global-african-history/ladinos-and-bozales-a-brief-early-history-of-africans-in-colombia-1500-1800/

Reviews:
Dawson, Eduardo, review of Beyond Babylon: Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada, by Larissa Brewer Garcia, Arc: Journal of the School of Religious Studies, McGill University 49 (2021): 156–160.

"When Europe Met Africa: Political Coquetry and the Ontology of the Modern". The Laurel Review, 52.1, Spring 2019, http://laurelreview.org/issues/521

Digital Humanities:

Transcriptions (Spanish paleography):
Audiencia de México; Rivera, Diego de; Balli, Juan Bautista; Carvajal, Gonzalo de, 2022, "Relación de las tres sentencias que ha habido en el pleito del mayorazgo de Doña Ana de Mérida y Molina, 1622-1626", https://doi.org/10.18738/T8/BE78W7, Texas Data Repository, V1

Recent Activity:
https://unlockingarchives.com/