Martha Few, Department of History, Penn State University

About

Martha Few is Professor of Latin American history at Penn State University and Senior Editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review. Her work concentrates on the ethnohistory of indigenous peoples under colonial rule through the lenses of medicine and public health, gender and sexuality, and human-animal studies.

Professor Few is author of For All of Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala (2015), Centering Animals in Latin American History (2013), and Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala (2002).

Professor Few was recently awarded a 2017 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Collaborative Research Fellowship. Additionally, she has been a Rockefeller Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. She has also held residential research fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University and the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA.

Dr. Few is also an editor of the book series "Routledge Research in New Colonial Histories of Latin America," Routledge Press, with Kevin Gosner (University of Arizona) and Ryan Kashanipour (Northern Arizona University).

Professor Few recently 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. She is currently at work on a history of insects in the making of the New World, and on a collaborative project on the history of the postmortem cesarean operation for fetal baptism in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires.