Dr. Max Deardorff is a historian of colonial Latin America, the early Atlantic, and the global early modern Iberian world. His first book, A Tale of Two Granadas: Custom, Community, and Citizenship in the Spanish Empire, 1568-1668 (Cambridge University Press, 2023), focuses on the first indigenous immigrants into Spanish colonial cities in what we now know as the highlands of Colombia. The Muisca-majority native population primarily served Spaniards in their houses and their agricultural estates. But A Tale of Two Granadas demonstrates that an important minority managed to establish themselves as property-owning urban citizens. The book also details the activity of a generation of mixed ethnicity (mestizo) activists who came of age at the end of the sixteenth century and successfully militated for representation within the organs of government in colonial settlements. A Tale of Two Granadas places the events in colonial Colombia within the frame of Catholic religious movements in the Spanish Americas and offers conclusions about the development of ideas about race in the early Atlantic world. His current research explores the history of convicts (some of them natives) and slaves impressed into service in the navies of the Spanish Empire’s colonial cities to fight off pirates and contraband traders.
His articles have appeared in a variety of venues, including Colonial Latin American Historical Review, Journal of Family History, Ethnohistory, and Rechtsgeschichte-Legal History. Dr. Deardorff is a former fellow at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt, Germany, a Fulbright Scholar, and has also received funding from the Mellon Foundation, the Nanovic Institute, and the Kellogg Institute. He has lectured widely on his research in Colombia, Brazil, Spain, France, Germany, Holland, and across the US. His Ph.D. is from the University of Notre Dame (2015).
AIIS-themed courses Dr. Deardorff teaches/has taught:
HIS 3942 The Conquest of Mexico
LAH 3130 Colonial Latin America
LAH 4930 The Native Struggle for Justice in the Spanish Empire
LAH 4930 The Tupac Amaru Uprising