Prof. Martha Few

Martha Few is Associate Professor of Latin American history at the University of Arizona. Her research and teaching focus on colonial Guatemala and Mexico, Mesoamerican ethnohistory, the history of medicine and healing, religion, and gender studies.

Prof. Few's book Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala (University of Texas Press, 2002) uses Inquisition records from the capital city of Santiago de Guatemala to explore women's participation in religious cultures outside of the formal institution of the church to analyze how they forged social relationships, dealt with community conflicts, ran businesses, healed illnesses and negotiated pregnancy and childbirth.

Prof. Few has two new books nearing completion. The first is All of Humanity: New World Medical Cultures and the Construction of Western Medicine. This work uses the case study of colonial Guatemala to tell the story of how New World medical knowledge, framed by European colonial expansion in the Americas and produced by not only by Creole and Spanish doctors and scientists, but also Maya medical practitioners, female healers and midwives, priest-botanists, and others, made important but often unacknowledged contributions to what we know today as "Western Medicine". The second project is an edited book Centering Animals: Writing Animals Into Latin American History that she is working on in collaboration with Zeb Tortorici at UCLA. It explores the history of economic, social, cultural, religious and scientific relationships between humans and animals, insects, fish, and birds in Latin America from the colonial period to the present.

During spring 2009, Prof. Few was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. She has also held research fellowships at the Newberry Library in Chicago (1999-2000 as a Rockefeller Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, and summer 2006), the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University (fall 1995 and fall 2005, both as the Ruth and Lincoln Ekstrom Fellow), and at the Huntington Library in Pasadena (spring 2006 as an Evelyn S. Nation and Andrew W. Mellon Fellow).

Some journal articles and book chapters that Prof. Few has recently published include "Atlantic World Monsters: Monstrous Births and the Politics of Pregnancy in Colonial Guatemala," in Vollendorf and Kostrun, eds., Gender and Religion in the Atlantic World (2009); "Medical Mestizaje and the Politics of Pregnancy in Colonial Guatemala, 1660-1730" in Daniela Bleichmar et. al., eds., Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500-1800 (2008); "'That Monster of Nature': Gender, Sexuality, and the Medicalization of a 'Hermaphrodite' in Late Colonial Guatemala," special issue "Sexual Encounters/Sexual Collisions: Alternative Sexualities in Colonial Mesoamerica," Ethnohistory 54:1 (Winter 2007), pp. 159-176; "'Our Lord Entered His Body': Miraculous Healing and Children's Bodies in Colonial New Spain," in Susan Schroeder and Stafford Poole, eds. Religion in New Spain (University of New Mexico Press, 2007), pp. 114-124; and "Chocolate, Sex, and Disorderly Women in Late-Seventeenth and Early-Eighteenth-Century Guatemala," Ethnohistory 52:4 (fall 2005), pp. 673-687.

This fall 2009 Prof. Few will teach Hist. 301, a methodology class for history majors, and History 695b, a graduate course on colonial Mexico. In Spring 2010, she will teach History 396a "Travel Writing in Latin America" a senior capstone research class, and 465z/565z "The History of Central America."

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