This profile was current as of 2015, when he was part of the on-campus Kellogg community.
My name is Max Deardorff and I am a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma. I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History, having received a Bachelors degree in Spanish Literature from Tulane and a Masters degree in History from the University of Illinois-Chicago. I specialize in the history of early modern Spain and colonial Latin America, with Karen Graubart as my adviser. Broadly speaking, I am interested in the social history of the Iberian Atlantic, with particular emphasis on the interplay between race and ethnicity, institutional religion, and legal structures. My dissertation, titled A Tale of Two Granadas: Tridentine Reform, Rebellion, and the Formulation of Christian Citizenship in Southern Spain and the Andes, 1563-1614 explores how issues of Catholic reform stemming from the Council of Trent (1545-1563) transformed inter-ethnic relationships between Christian Spaniards and the subject communities they had recently conquered. Through an examination of legal pleas lodged by members of two of those communities the Moriscos of Granada and the Muisca in what is modern-day Colombia lodged in the wake of rebellion, I explore how juridical identities in the Spanish Empire became interwoven with religious ones.