Rebecca Earle

Professor of HIstory, University of Warwick

I am a cultural historian of Spanish America and early modern Europe. I am interested in how ordinary, every-day cultural practices such as eating or dressing, or using stamps, shape how we think about the world. Although my early work was rooted in a very specific part of the world--southern Colombia--these days I tend to study the movement of ideas and practices across larger geographies.

My first book, Spain and the Independence of Colombia, tried to explain the collapse of Spanish colonialism in early nineteenth-century Colombia (or New Granada, as it was known at the time). Subsequent work took on ampler time-spans and broader geographies. My second monograph, The Return of the Native, offered a hemispheric interpretation of elite nationalism in post-colonial Spanish America, based on both written texts and also visual and material culture. More recently my work has examined the early colonial era, again from a broadly hemispheric perspective. The Body of the Conquistador explores the centrality of food, and eating, to the construction of colonial space across the Spanish Indies.

My current projects grow out of my interest in the cultural significance of food and eating, and explore the impact of new world foods on early modern European mentalities and political culture. Together with my colleague Claudia Stein, I have begun an exploration of the reception of new world foods in early modern Europe. Food, we argue, was central to the exercise of the new biopolitical tactics of governance used by early modern states, because these tactics targeted the human body. We thus locate early modern European debates about new world foods such as the potato in the context of these biological strategies and their oscillation between the body of the individual and the body of the population. This project thus links transformations in individual eating habits to state efforts to ensure territorial security and economic strength. For more information, see http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/emforum/collaborate/primary/potato

I am also exploring the distinctive Spanish American pictorial genre known as casta painting. An example appears below. A forthcoming article (William and Mary Quarterly, July 2016) on 'the pleasures of taxonomy' situates these paintings in the sentimental world of the colonial romance, as well as in the debates about human nature and mankind that typified eighteenth-century enlightened science.