Irene Silverblatt, Professor Emerita of Cultural Anthropology

Irene Silverblatt
Office Location:  500 W 111th St, Apt 2B, New York, NY 10025
Office Phone:  (919) 641-0319
Email Address:  send me a message

Education:

Specialties:

Comparative Colonial Studies
Globalization of Culture
Race and Ethnicity
Political Economy
Nationalism
Gender
Research Interests:

Irene Silverblatt, Ph.D. University of Michigan, 1981, researches the cultural dimensions of state- building and colonization in Latin America. She is particularly interested in the relation of gender, racial discourses, and historical memory to the construction and experience of power. As a Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, she will be writing a social history of Peru's political ideologies and the making of colonial Andean subjects. These concerns, combined with an interest in the history of anthropology, orient her next project on the emerging fields of Andean ethnography--in the United States and Peru--during World War II and the first decades of the Cold War. Her publications include Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru (1987); "Imperial Dilemmas, the Politics of Kinship, and Inca Reconstructions of History," (1988), winner of the American Society for Ethnohistory's Heizer prize; and numerous articles.

Representative Publications   (More Publications)
  1. with Irene Silverblatt and Helene Silverblatt editors and introduction, translated by Jerry Glenn and Florian Birkmayer with Helene Silverblatt and Irene Silverblatt. Harvest of Blossoms: Poems from a Life Cut Short. October, October, 2008. [html]
  2. Silverblatt, I. Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World.  Duke University Press, 2004.  [abs]
  3. Silverblatt, I. Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru.  Princeton University Press, 1987.  [abs]
  4. Silverblatt, I. "The Black Legend and Global Conspiracies: The Spanish Inquisition, Race-Thinking and the Emerging Modern World." Rereading the Black Legend. Edited by Greer, M; Mignolo, W. 2008.
  5. Silverblatt, I. "New World Christians and New World Fears in Colonial Peru." From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and its Futures. Edited by Axel, BK. 2002. (Reprint of "New World Christians...." published in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2000)