Tuesday, November 12, 2024
4:00-5:30 p.m.
Joukowsky Forum (155), 111 Thayer
Reception to follow
About the Event
Historian Max Deardorff will speak on “The Lure of the City: Muisca, Inca, and Yanacona Settlers in Post-Conquest Colombia.”
About the Speaker
Max Deardorff is assistant professor of history at the University of Florida. In his first book, A Tale of Two Granadas: Custom, Community, and Citizenship in the Spanish Empire, 1568-1668 (Cambridge University Press, 2023), he conducted a comparative study focusing on new imperial subjects seeking enfranchisement in frontier towns and cities of two provinces of the far-flung Spanish monarchy: Granada in Spain’s formerly Islamic south, and New Granada, a northern Andean colony in the mountains of modern-day Colombia that was home to the Muisca people. His study of indigenous legal activism in the face of the expansion of the Christian monarchy revealed dynamic frontier politics of both conflict and accommodation. The book’s focus on the contested integration between natives and settlers also provided an opportunity to examine the relationship between emergent early modern categories of race–expressed through the notion of “blood purity” (limpieza de sangre)—and conceptions of “citizenship” in the sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish Empire.
A Tale of Two Granadas was awarded both the Bandelier/Lavrin Book Prize in Colonial Latin American History from the Rocky Mountain Conference in Latin American Studies and the Alfred B. Thomas Book Award from the Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies. Articles based on this project have appeared in a variety of venues, including Ethnohistory, the Journal of Family History, and Rechtsgeschichte-Legal History. The article “The Ties that Bind” received the triennial prize for “best early career article” in any period of Iberian history from the Association for Spanish & Portuguese Historical Studies (ASPHS).
Deardorff’s subsequent book project focuses on the history of the convicts and slaves impressed into service in the navies of the Spanish Empire and stationed in colonial cities in the Caribbean and Pacific to fight off pirates and contraband traders. A cultural history, the book details the life of unfree oarsmen both onboard the king’s galleys and ashore in New World port cities.
Deardorff is a former fellow at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt, Germany, a Fulbright Scholar, and a University Term Professor. His research has received funding from the Mellon Foundation, the Nanovic Institute, and the Kellogg Institute. He has lectured widely on my research in Colombia, Brazil, Peru, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and across the US.
