Karen Graubart

Professor of History
Professor of Spanish Languages and Literatures, and Gender Studies
History

Research Interests

Colonial Latin America; Medieval Spain; Gender; Race; Slavery; Indigenous Peoples; Law

Related Courses Taught

Colonial Latin American History; Slaveries in Latin America; Fugitive Blackness; Gender, Sexuality, and Colonization in Latin America; Atlantic History; Archives and Power

Biography

Karen Graubart is the author of two books. The most recent, Republics of Difference: Religious and Racial Self-Governance in the Spanish Atlantic World (Oxford University Press, 2022) won the Transatlantic Studies Association Book Prize. It examines the way that units of limited self-governance—republics—shaped the ways that Muslims, Jews, and Africans in Seville and Indigenous and African peoples in Peru experienced the early modern world. It uses innovative techniques like GIS mapping as well as traditional close readings of archival sources to see how these subjects mobilized notions of difference for their own purposes. Her first book, With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of a Colonial World in Peru, 1550-1700 (Stanford University Press, 2007), was awarded the Ligia Parra Jahn Prize from the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies. She has published articles in The William and Mary Quarterly, Hispanic American Historical Review, Colonial Latin American Review, Slavery and Abolition, and other journals and books. Her work has been supported by the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Carter Brown Library, the American Association of University Women, and Fulbright.