About
Martha Few is Liberal Arts Research Professor of Latin American history and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. Her research concentrates on the histories of the Maya and other Indigenous peoples during Spanish colonial rule in Guatemala, Central America, and southern Mexico through the lenses of medicine and public health, gender and sexuality, environmental history, and human-animal studies. She served as Senior Editor of the Hispanic America Historical Review from 2017-2022.
Professor Few is author of Baptism Through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean in the Spanish Empire, with Zeb Tortorici and Adam Warren (Penn State University Press, 2020). This book was awarded the 2021 Teaching Edition Award by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender (SSEMWG). Few is also author of For All of Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala (2015), Centering Animals in Latin American History (2013) with Zeb Tortorici, and Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala (2002).
Professor Few has recently been awarded the Audrey Lumsden-Kouvel Long-Term Fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, and a Humanities Institute Residential Fellowship at Penn State (2021-22), as well as an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Collaborative Research Fellowship (2017-2019). She has also been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, a Rockefeller Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Newberry Library, and has held residential research fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University and the Huntington Library in San Marino.
Professor Few is author of Baptism Through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean in the Spanish Empire, with Zeb Tortorici and Adam Warren (Penn State University Press, 2020). This book was awarded the 2021 Teaching Edition Award by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender (SSEMWG). Few is also author of For All of Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala (2015), Centering Animals in Latin American History (2013) with Zeb Tortorici, and Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala (2002).
Professor Few has recently been awarded the Audrey Lumsden-Kouvel Long-Term Fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, and a Humanities Institute Residential Fellowship at Penn State (2021-22), as well as an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Collaborative Research Fellowship (2017-2019). She has also been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, a Rockefeller Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Newberry Library, and has held residential research fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University and the Huntington Library in San Marino.
Professor Few's recent journal articles include “Epidemics, Indigenous Communities, and Public Health in the COVID-19 Era: Views from Smallpox Inoculation Campaigns in Colonial Guatemala,” Journal of Global History (15:3)15: 3 in the Special Issue: Pandemics that Changed the World. Historical Reflections on COVID-19 (2020); “The Lives and Deaths of Caged Birds: Transatlantic Voyages of Wild Creatures from the Americas to Spain, 1740s-1790s” in Ethnohistory (2020), and “Early Modern Insects and Indigenous Mesoamerica,” Sixteenth Century Journal: The Journal of Early Modern Studies (Fall 2019).
Professor Few is currently finishing a new book Insects and the Making of the New World, an environmental history of human relationships with five insects — locusts, silkworms, bees, ants, and cochineal
(forthcoming from the University of Texas Press), and a monograph on the early history of the cesarean operation in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, jointly authored with Zeb Tortorici and Adam Warren.
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