Kristin Huffine

Current Research

My research investigates the ways in which science, race, and empire intersected in colonial Latin America. My first book project, Producing Christians from Half-Men and Beasts: Jesuit Ethnography and Guarani Response in Colonial Rio de la Plata (forthcoming, University of Pittsburgh Press), explores how Jesuit knowledge production and indigenous Guaraní agency shaped colonial subjectivity and authority.

I am also beginning work on the Guaraní oral prophetic tradition in place at the time of the Jesuit arrival in colonial Río de la Plata in the early seventeenth century, and its relationship to an emergent Guaraní-Christian subject formation developed in the practice of the order’s spiritual exercises. My next book, The Art of Discernment in Río de la Plata’s Guaraní Missions, 1609-1768, examines native efforts to negotiate Christian instruction in the missions and how their written and oral expressions of traditional Guaraní engagement with the soul produced a mediated and transformative experience of what it meant to be Christian and Guaraní.

I have held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship, and Fulbright, among others. My research examines natural wonders, miracles, and religious practice through the lenses of cultural interaction and power dynamics.

Major Publications

• Producing Christians from Half-Men and Beasts: Jesuit Ethnography and Guarani Response in Colonial Rio de la Plata. Forthcoming with the University of Pittsburgh.
• “Fashioning the Soul in Colonial Río de la Plata: Religious Education in the Guaraní Missions.” Ethnohistory, (2022) 69 (4): 429–49.
• “Thinking at the Margins: Subalterns and the Spanish American Past.” In Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America: Synoptic Methods and Practices, eds. Karen Melvin and Sylvia Sellers-Garcia. University of New Mexico Press, 2017.
• Science, Power and the Order of Nature in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. Co-edited with Daniela Bleichmar, Paula DeVos and Kevin Sheehan. Stanford University Press, 2008.
• “Raising Paraguay from Decline: Natural History, Ethnography, and the Science of Race in the Eighteenth-Century Accounts of the Paraguayan Jesuit Fathers.” In Jesuit Knowledge, Natural History, and the New World, edited by Luis Millones Figueroa and Domingo Ledesma. Iberoamericana / Vervuert, 2005.

Teaching Interests

As a scholar, my research focuses on science, race and empire in colonial Latin America. I offer three undergraduate classes that address race and empire in Spain and Spanish America in detail: Indigenous Mexico, Colonial Latin America and the Spanish Inquisition. My graduate classes address all three topics. They include science, race and empire in the Atlantic World and Race and Ethnography in Colonial and Modern Mexico. In addition to this, I teach the two introductory surveys on Colonial and Modern Latin America. I also teach Educator Licensure courses for students completing the requirements to teach high school in Illinois.

Courses Taught

• HIST 110 History of the Western World I
• HIST 170 World History I
• HIST 302 The Age of Alexander the Great (when relevant)
• HIST 303 History of Ancient Rome (when relevant)
• HIST 304 The Fall of Rome and Late Antiquity (when relevant)
• HIST 305 Europe in the Early Middle Ages
• HIST 493 Undergraduate Independent Study
• HIST 610 States, Aristocracies, and Ruling Elites; History and Theory
• HIST 710 Research Seminar: Rebellion
• HIST 736 Latin for Historians

Interdisciplinary Affiliations

Center for Latino and Latin American Studies