Kristin Huffine
Assistant Professor
Fields of Study: Latin America, Atlantic World, Borderlands/Frontier, Colonial Empires, Cultural/Intellectual, Medicine and Science, Race and Ethnicity, Religion
E-mail: khuffine@niu.edu
Phone: 815-753-0132
Office: Zulauf 716
Education: Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, 2006
Current Research: My book manuscript, ‘Producing Christians from Half-Men and Beasts’: Jesuit Ethnography and Guaraní Response in the Paraguayan Jesuit Missions, examines the moral and ethnographic categories of natural philosophical analysis that helped Jesuits proclaim colonial authority over Indians and land in the Society’s province of Paraguay. I argue that the production of Jesuit New World knowledge, articulated by the missionaries and historians of the order, and sanctioned by the pope and Spanish crown, created both a regional identity and hegemonic form of colonial subjectivity that would dominate competing creole attempts to lay claim to the region, and would be challenged and negotiated by indigenous elites for a period of 150 years. While challenges and concessions to regional indigenous authority took place within the material and discursive spheres of Guaraní relocation and reduction, education, work, and daily life, efforts on the part of Jesuits to demarcate territory and colonial subjectivity among potential European and creole rivals were located in the continued publications of Jesuit civil and natural histories. My book examines how the publications of the mid-to-late eighteenth century transformed the terms of this project from a language of natural wonders, miracles, idolatry, and reform, to the late colonial Jesuit formulations of an enlightenment science of race.
Major/Recent Publications:
Teaching Interests: As a scholar, my research focuses on science, race, power, and empire in Colonial Latin America. My courses reflect these same interests. I offer three classes on race: Indigenous Mexico, Indigenous Peru, and the African Diaspora in Colonial Latin America. My graduate classes include Methods of Postcolonial Theory, Race and Ethnography in Colonial and Modern Mexico, and Science, Race, and Empire in Colonial and Modern Latin America. In addition to this, I teach the two introductory seminars on Colonial and Modern Latin American history.
Courses Taught:
Interdisciplinary Affiliations:
Center for Latino and Latin American Studies
Link to CV | Link to Personal Webpage