About
Martha Few is Professor of Latin American history and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. She is Senior Editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review. Her research concentrates on the histories of 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.
Professor Few has a new book forthcoming, Baptism Through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean in the Spanish Empire, with Zeb Tortorici, Adam Warren, and Nina M. Scott, from the "Latin American Originals" series at Penn State University Press. She is also 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. 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.
Professor Few has a new book forthcoming, Baptism Through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean in the Spanish Empire, with Zeb Tortorici, Adam Warren, and Nina M. Scott, from the "Latin American Originals" series at Penn State University Press. She is also 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. 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.
Professor Few is Program Committee Co-Chair, with Cathleen Cahill (Penn State), for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians' next "Big Berks" meetings at Johns Hopkins University in 2020, on the theme of "Gendered Environments." She is also on the Program Committee for the 2019 annual meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory that will be held at Penn State. Professor Few edits the Routledge Press book series "New Colonial Histories of Latin America" with Kevin Gosner (University of Arizona) and Ryan Kashanipour (Northern Arizona University), and serves as President of the Southwest Seminar: Consortium on Colonial Latin American History.
Professor Few is currently at work on a monograph on the early history of the cesarean operation in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, and on an environmental history of insects in the making of the New World .