Research Interests for Irene Silverblatt

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.

Keywords:

Politics of culture, state making, colonization, ethnohistory, gender, South America

Representative 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, 2008) [html]
2. Silverblatt, I, Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (2004), Duke University Press [abs]
3. Silverblatt, I, Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru (1987), Princeton University Press [abs]
4. Silverblatt, I, The Black Legend and Global Conspiracies: The Spanish Inquisition, Race-Thinking and the Emerging Modern World, in Rereading the Black Legend, edited by Greer, M; Mignolo, W (2008), University of Chicago Press
5. Silverblatt, I, New World Christians and New World Fears in Colonial Peru, in From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and its Futures, edited by Axel, BK (2002), Duke University Press (Reprint of "New World Christians...." published in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2000.)