Professor Rebecca Earle
Room 337 Humanities Building, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL England
Telephone: 024 765 23466 (outside UK: 44 24 765 23466)
Email: r.earle@warwick.ac.uk
Office Hours: Mondays 9.00-10.00 and Thursdays 9.00-10.00 or (preferably) by appointment at any mutually convenient time.
Academic Profile
Ph.D 1994 University of Warwick
M.A. 1990 University of Warwick
M.Sc. 1987 University of Warwick
B.A. 1986 Bryn Mawr College
Professor in History
Director of Graduate Studies
Research
My research has focused on five broad areas of Spanish American history: late colonial and early national Colombia; letters, print and modernity; the links between clothing, consumption and identity; the role of the past in shaping elite nationalisms; and the cultural history of food.
My doctoral and early published work concentrated on the first of these areas. Spain and the Independence of Colombia, ‘Rape and the Anxious Republic’, ‘A Grave for Europeans?’, and ‘Indian Rebellion and Bourbon Reform in New Granada’ all examine the political, social, and cultural history of Colombia during the period between 1780 and 1830, looking in particular detail at the war of independence from Spain in the first decades of the 19th century. Royalism, health, and indigenous revolt have been particular interests. ‘The French Revolution in the Spanish American Imagination’ examines this period in a hemispheric context. I have studied the relationship between printing and the arrival of modernity in Spanish America in ‘Information and Disinformation in Late Colonial New Granada’, and ‘The Role of Print in the Spanish-American Wars of Independence’. The relationship between letter-writing and personal identity is explored in ‘Letters and Love in Colonial Spanish America’, and Epistolary Selves. I study the significance of clothing and consumption within the economic, national and racial history of Spanish America in ‘‘Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!!’’, ‘Luxury, Clothing and Race’, ‘Consumption and Excess in Spanish America’, and ‘Nationalism and National Costume’. The Return of the Native, ‘Padres de la Patria and the Ancestral Past’, ‘Creole Patriotism and the Myth of the Loyal Indian’, ‘Sobre Héroes y Tumbas’, and ‘Monumentos y museos’ derive from my large comparative investigation into the place of the pre-Columbian past within elite visions of the nation in nineteenth-century Spanish America.
My current research explores the cultural history of food in Latin America. I have just completed a study of the centrality of food the Spain’s colonial endeavours in the Americas. This will be published (as Land Without Bread) by Cambridge University Press in 2012. ‘If You Eat Their Food. . .’, the first instalment of this project, investigates the role of diet in creating the ‘Indian’ and ‘Spanish’ bodies that underpinned Spain’s colonial universe in the early modern era. I am now writing a more general cultural history of food in Latin America, for the University of New Mexico Press.
I am also beginning a new project on the distinctive Spanish American pictorial genre known as casta painting. An example appears below:
José de Paez, De Español, y Negra, Produce Mulato
Recent Conference and Workshop Organisation
'Seeing the Nation: Cartography and Politics in Spanish America', Universidad de los Andes, 25-27 August 2010 (with Mauricio Nieto and Santiago Muñoz)
'Mexico at Warwick Day', University of Warwick, 25 November 2009 (with John King)
'Moctezuma's Feast', British Museum, 21 November 2009
'Seeing the Nation: Costumbrismo in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America', University of Essex, 18 September 2009
'Writing the Republic: Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America', University of Warwick, 7-8 November 2008 Programme
'Mexico and the Enlightenment', Palazzo Pesaro Papafava, Venice, March 2008 (with Andrew Laird) Programme Conference Report
'Chiles, Chocolate and Tomatoes: Global Cultures of Food After Columbus', Palazzo Pesaro Papafava, Venice, January 2008 Programme Conference Report
Undergraduate Modules
Themes and Problems in Latin American and Caribbean History (AM101)
The Cultural History of Food in Latin America (AM205)
Histories of Gender in the Americas: Ladies, Wenches, Hombres and Machos (AM411)
Sexuality and Marriage in the Americas, 1500-1850 (AM405)
European Encounters With the New World (HI31B) (with Claudia Stein)
Postgraduate Modules
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/postgraduate/taughtma/racenationmexico
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/postgraduate/taughtma/mamodules/casta_painting
Themes and Problems in the History of Race in the Americas
Selected Publications
The Return of the Native: Indians and Mythmaking in Spanish America, 1810-1930, Duke University Press (Durham, 2008), 367pp.
(Winner of the Conference on Latin American History's 2008 Bolton-Johnson Prize Honorable Mention)
Spain and the Independence of Colombia , University of Exeter Press (Exeter, 2000), 254pp.
Rumours of War: Civil Conflict in Nineteenth Century Latin America , University of London/Institute of Latin American Studies (London, 2000), 195pp.
Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600-1945 , Ashgate Press (Aldershot, 1999), 231pp.
Articles
‘European Cuisine and the Columbian Exchange: Introduction’, Food and History, vol. 7:1 (2010), pp. 3-10.
‘‘If You Eat Their Food . . .’: Diets and Bodies in Early Colonial Spanish America’, American Historical Review, vol. 115:3 (2010), pp. 688-713.
(Winner of the Agricultural History Society's Wayne D. Rasmussen Award)
‘Algunos Pensamientos sobre “el indio borracho” en el imaginario criollo’, Revista de Estudios Sociales (Colombia), vol. 29 (2008), pp. 18-27.
' Sobre Héroes y Tumbas: National Symbols in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America', Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 85:3 (2005), pp. 375-416.
‘Padres de la Patria and the Ancestral Past: Celebrations of Independence in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 34:4 (2002), pp. 775-805.
‘‘Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!!’: Clothing, Race and Identity in the Americas, 17th-19th Centuries’, History Workshop Journal, issue 52 (2001), pp. 175-95.
‘Creole Patriotism and the Myth of the Loyal Indian’, Past & Present, vol. 172 (2001), pp. 125-45.
‘Information and Disinformation in Late Colonial New Granada’, The Americas, vol. 54:2 (1997), pp. 167-84.
‘A Grave for Europeans?’: Disease, Death, and the Spanish-American Revolutions’, War in History, vol. 3:2 (1996), pp. 371-83.
‘Indian Rebellion and Bourbon Reform in New Granada: Riots in Pasto, 1780-1800’, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 73:1 (1993), pp. 99-124.
Book Chapters
‘Clothing and Ethnicity in Colonial Spanish America’, The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives, eds. Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeill, Routledge (London, 2010), pp. 383-5.
‘Nationalism and National Costume in Spanish America’, The Politics of Dress in Asia and the Americas, eds. Mina Roces and Louise Edwards, Sussex Academic Press (Eastbourne, 2007), pp. 163-181.
‘Consumption and Excess in Colonial and Early-Independent Spanish America’, Imported Modernity in Post-Colonial State-Formation: The Appropriation of Political, Educational and Cultural Models in Nineteenth-Century Latin America , eds. Marcelo Caruso and Eugenia Roldán Vera, Peter Lang (Frankfurt am Main, 2007), pp. 341-61.
'Monumentos y museos: La nacionalización del pasado precolombino en la Hispanoamerica decimonónica', Galerias del progreso: museos, exposiciones y cultura visual en America Latina , eds. Beatriz Gonzalez Stephan and Jens Andermann, Beatriz Viterbo Editora : Colección Estudios Culturales (Buenos Aires, 2006), pp. 27-56.
‘Luxury, Clothing and Race in Colonial Spanish America’, Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods , eds. Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, Palgrave (London, 2003), pp. 219-27.
‘The Role of Print in the Spanish-American Wars of Independence’, The Political Power of the Word , ed. Ivan Jaksic, University of London/Institute of Latin American Studies (London, 2002), pp. 9-33.
‘Rape and the Anxious Republic. Revolutionary Colombia, 1810-1830’, Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America , eds. Maxine Molyneux and Elizabeth Dore, Duke University Press (Durham, 2000), pp. 127-46.
Recent and Current Research Topics Supervised (PhD, MA)
I am happy to supervise postgraduate research on topics concerned with the cultural history of colonial and 19th-century Spanish America. Additionally, I am interested in supervising projects related to the history of masculinities, femininities and race in the USA. Here are some of the topics and student I have supervised, co-supervised and advised:
Andrea Cadelo, 'Luxury, Sensibility, Climate and Taste in the Eighteenth-Century Worldwide Racialisation of Difference' (Ph.D.)
Cecilia Tossounian, 'The Body Beautiful and the Beauty of Nation: Representing Gender and Modernity (Buenos Aires 1918-1940)' (Ph.D., European University Institute, Florence)
Helen Cowie, 'Naturalistas sin Fronteras': Conquering Nature in the Spanish Empire (1750-1850)' (Ph.D.)
Rebecca Griffin, 'Marriage and Courtship in Slave Culture in Antebellum North Carolina' (Ph.D.)
Sergio Lussana, 'Band of Brothers: Enslaved Men of the Antebellum South' (Ph.D.)
Deborah Toner, 'Alcohol, Literature and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Mexico' (Ph.D.)
Sergio Lussana, 'Band of Brothers: Enslaved African-American Masculinity in the Antebellum United States' (M.A.)
Kim Patrick, 'Why a Million Men Marched: An Analysis of Politics, Identity and the Million Man March' (M.A.)
Emma Rhodes-Brown, '"Know First Who You Are, Then Deck Yourself Out Accordingly": Dress and Adornment As a Form of Expression under Slavery in the American South' (M.A.)
Hannah Stephenson, 'Symbolising Slavery: The Narrative of Sojourner Truth and the Female Slave Experience' (M.A.)
Deborah Toner, 'Maize, Alcohol and Cultural Identity in Colonial Mexico' (M.A.)
For information about the Warwick-Essex-Los Andes Leverhulme Trust Academic Collaboration International Research Network visit
