About

Karen B. Graubart  is Professor of History and is the author of With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550-1700 (Stanford University Press, 2007), which was awarded the Ligia Parra Jahn prize from the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies in 2008. She has been a Kellogg Institute faculty fellow since 2007.

She has published articles in Hispanic American Historical Review, Colonial Latin American Review, Slavery and Abolition, The William and Mary Quarterly, and other journals and books.  Her work has received generous support from numerous foundations, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright, the American Association of University Women, and the John Carter Brown Library.

 

ISP Advisee:
Halle Keane

Thematic Interests

Self-governance in Black and indigenous communities after Spanish conquest of the Americas. Customary law, race, gender, ethnicity. GIS mapping.

Current Research

Recently completed a book titled Republics of Difference. Racial and Religious Self-Governance in the Iberian Atlantic (under contract with Oxford University Press, expected publication 2019). Next project will be a book titled Fugitive Blackness: Self-Governance in the Early Spanish Circum-Caribbean.

Research Sub-Discipline
Countries
Regions
Research Tags

Books

Journal Articles

Book Chapters

Other Accomplishments & Recognitions
  • James Alexander Robertson Prize for the article "Learning from the Qadi: The Jurisdiction of Local Rule in the Early Colonial Andes," Hispanic American Historical Review 95, 2 (2015)
  • National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellowship for her latest book project, tentatively titled “Republics of Difference: Religious and Racial Self-Governance in the Iberian Atlantic, 1400–1650” (2017)
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Teaching and Learning Grant, “Reading Moby Dick and One Hundred Years of Solitude: The Integrated Humanities Project,” Senior Scholar Consultant (Project Director: Richard Haw, John Jay College) (2013–14)
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, John Carter Brown Library (2009–10)
  • American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2009–10) 
  • American Philosophical Society Sabbatical Fellowship (declined) (2009–10) 
  • Ligia Parra Jahn Prize, Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies, for With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society, Peru 1550–1700 (2008)
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Teaching and Learning Grant, “Making Objects Speak,” Senior–Scholar Consultant  (Project Directors: Elisabeth Gitter, Dean Jane Bowers, John Jay College/CUNY) (2008–09) 
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, “From Moriscos to Mestizos: The Iberian Roots of Ethnicity in the New World” (2004–05)
Podcast

Racial and Religious Self-Governance in the Spanish Atlantic World with Historian Karen Graubart

Mar 14, 2023

Interviewed by Kellogg PhD Fellows Aitor Valdesogo and Juan Vargas, historian Karen Graubart, who is a Kellogg Institute faculty fellow, introduces her recently published book, "Republics of Difference: Religious and Racial Self-Governance in the Spanish Atlantic World" (Oxford University Press, 2022). The result of more than 15 years of research, this book explores the mechanisms of self-governance that racialized and/or non-Christian communities put into practice in 15th-century Seville and 16th-17th century Lima.