Martha Few is Associate Professor of Latin American history at the University of Arizona. Her research and teaching focus on Guatemala and Mexico, Mesoamerican ethnohistory, the history of medicine and healing, religion, gender studies, and human-animal 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) draws on accounts of the lives and practices of primarily Mayan, African, and casta (mixed-race) female sorcerers, clandestine religious leaders, and magical healers and midwives in the capital. Community members from all segments of colonial society consulted these women in the multi-ethnic urban community of Santiago, and asked them to intervene in a variety of conflicts in daily life: in sexual and familial relations, disputes between neighbors and rival shop owners, instances of abusive public officials, employers, and husbands, and in cases of incurable and often strange illnesses. She utilized a microhistorical approach to analyze a rich but relatively limited documentary source base of seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Inquisition records to uncover information about the city's multi-ethnic female population and their ritual ties to other social groups, supplemented with sources such as Church sermons and correspondence, secular laws, travel accounts, and colonial-era histories.
Prof. Few has two new books nearing completion. The first is All of Humanity: Colonial Medicine, Indigenous Healing and Public Health in Enlightenment Guatemala. This book analyzes the development of local medical knowledge applied to early public health campaigns in the Audiencia of Guatemala, an area that encompasses what is today Central America and the Mexican state of Chiapas, and its transatlantic circulations in eighteenth- and early-ninteenth-century Enlightenment cultures. She traces this through the emergence and development of "medical humanitarianism," an ideology espoused by a modernizing sector of Guatemala's colonial elite, including political officials, priests, doctors, and military men, who considered it their moral responsibility to apply the new medical innovations of the era to cure and prevent disease among Guatemala's inhabitants, including the majority indigenous Maya population. The work highlights how colonial medicine in theory and practice absorbed and responded to indigenous, gendered, religious, and hybridized medical cultures, even as it may have presented itself as the autonomous product of Spanish Peninsular and Creole elites connected to European metropoles. And, under the stress of resistance to public health campaigns, the practice of Enlightenment medicine in Guatemala often had to make tacit and even at times explicit concessions to the complicated nature of local medical cultures.
Prof. Few is also co-editor with Zeb Tortorici of Centering Animals: Writing Animals Into Latin American History currently under contract and forthcoming from Duke University Press. The essays in Centering Animals contribute to the growing body of historical writing on the multiple interactions between humans and non-human animals, and explore what Latin American histories look like when they are written in ways that focus on animals and on human-animal interactions. Despite the methodological challenges inherent in writing histories of animals, this approach enables the authors to critically interrogate the category of human at the same time that they examine the multiple ways that such species-categorical boundaries were challenged, broken down, rendered ambiguous, and sometimes reified in specific Latin American historical moments.
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 "Circulating Smallpox Knowledges: Guatemalan Doctors, Maya Indians, and Designing Spain's Royal Vaccination Expedition, 1780-1806," special issue "Circulation and Locality in Early Modern Science," British Journal for the History of Science (Fall 2010);
"Atlantic World Monsters: Monstrous Births and the Politics of Pregnancy in Colonial Guatemala," in Vollendorf and Kostrun, eds.,
Prof. Few is currently Director of Graduate Studies for the History Department. During fall semester 2011, she teaches History 396a: The History of the University of Arizona, and History 695B: The History of Medicine and Science in Latin America. During spring semester 2012, she teaches History 301: Introduction to the Study of History, a required course for history majors.
Martha Few
A.B., University of Chicago 1986
A.M./A.M., University of Chicago 1989
Ph. D., University of Arizona 1997
Associate Professor
Department of History
University of Arizona
Social Sciences 215
Tucson, AZ 85721-0027
tel: 520-621-5044
fax: 520-621-2422
mfew@u.arizona.edu