Martin Nesvig

Ph.D., Yale University (2004);
Assistant Professor of History

e-mail: mnesvig@miami.edu
Office: Rm. 615 Ashe
Phone: (305) 284-5965

Martin Nesvig is a native of San Diego, California and received a Ph.D. in Latin American history from Yale University. He divides his time between Miami and his adopted second home, Mexico City.

Professor Nesvig’s research and teaching interests focus on the religious and intellectual history of Mexico, with a particular focus on the early colonial period and the relationship between early modern Spanish and American ideas and society. His first monograph, Ideology and Inquisition: The World of the Censors in Early Mexico (Yale University Press, 2009), examines formal legal and informal cultural practices of book censorship and thought control as undertaken by the Inquisition. Rather than present an image of monochromatic thought the Inquisition in Mexico revealed deep divisions and debates about humanism, the translation of Scripture, Erasmus, sexual norms, witchcraft and blasphemy. This is the first book-length study in English which analyzes the censors and jurists of the Spanish and Mexican Inquisitions in terms of their understanding and ideology in promoting censorship.

Currently, he has two main research projects. The first is a history of frontier religion and society in colonial western Mexico, tentatively titled “Hucksters, Orgies, Peyote and the Devil: Frontier Religion in Colonial Michoacán.” The study examines the complicated interplay between Spanish laypersons in culturally mixed regions of early western Mexico, especially along internal frontiers in New Spain. The overall picture of this religious culture, so far, was one of hybrid mixing of Iberian folk religion with pre-Hispanic and African religious, social and sexual systems. Professor Nesvig was an NEH fellow at the John Carter Brown in the Spring 2008 semester while conducting research on the project and has been conducting research on the project in the Mexican National Archive in the summers. The second project is a translation of works by largely ignored Franciscans: Alfonso de Castro, a theologian and theorist of Inquisition of Salamanca, Alonso Cabello, a Spanish-born Mexican twice convicted of Erasmian heresy, and Inquisitional deputy and missionary, criollo Diego Muñoz. The volume, Forgotten Franciscans, will be published by Pennsylvania State University Press as part of the Latin American Originals series.

More broadly he studies the social history of religion. He is editor of two volumes on the subject: Local Religion in Colonial Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, 2006) and Religious Culture in Modern Mexico (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). He has published articles on culture and society in Mexico in both English and Spanish in a wide range of professional journals: Colonial Latin American Review, Latin American Research Review, Hispanic American Historical Review, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, Church History, Journal of Social History, Tzintzun, and the Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación (Mexico).

Professor Nesvig has received grants and fellowships from various organizations and thanks the Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, and the National Endowment for the Humanities for their support.

Professor Nesvig offers courses on colonial Latin America; gender and sexuality in Latin America; the Inquisition; the Mexican Revolution; contact and conquest in early Latin America; and the history of the book in the Spanish Atlantic world.