Martha Few, Department of History, Penn State University

About

Martha Few is Professor of Colonial Latin American History at Penn State. Starting July 2017, she will begin a five-year term as a Senior Editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review (HAHR).

Few is author of For All of Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala (2015). This book was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2016 Bandelier/Lavrin Book Prize in Colonial Latin American History. She is also co-editor of Centering Animals in Latin American History (with Zeb Tortorici, 2013), and author of Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala (2002).

Professor Few's research, on topics such as medicine and public health, gender and sexuality, human-animal studies, and Mesoamerican ethnohistory has also been published in British Journal for the History of Science, Ethnohistory, Mesoamérica, and other publications. Few was recently awarded a 2017 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Collaborative Research Fellowship. Additionally, she has been a Rockefeller Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. She has also held residential research fellowships at the Newberry Library in Chicago, the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, and the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA.

Professor Few is currently writing a new book titled Insects and the Making of the New World, a history of human relationships with five insects -- locusts, silkworms, bees, ants, and cochineal. She is co-authoring a monograph, a global history of the rise and spread of the postmortem cesarean operation for fetal baptism in the Spanish and Portuguese empires, with Zeb Tortorici and Adam Warren. Recently, she completed an English translation, with critical introduction, of Pedro José de Arrese’s eighteenth-century postmortem cesarean manual with Zeb Tortorici, Adam Warren, and Nina M. Scott. This book, titled On Cesarean Operations and Fetal Baptism: An Eighteenth-Century Guatemalan Treatise in Historical Perspective, is forthcoming from the Latin American Originals series at Penn State University Press.