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Speaker: Pamela Voekel, Associate Professor of History and LALACS, Dartmouth College. Discussant: David Carrasco, Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America, Harvard University
Moderated by: Kirsten Weld, Professor of History, Harvard University
In her talk, Dr. Voekel will be discussing material from her latest book, For God and Liberty: Catholicism and Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1790-1861, which draws on more than forty archives in six languages and ten countries to offer a bold reinterpretation of Mexico’s path to independence. The Age of Revolution has traditionally been understood as an era of secularization, giving the transition from monarchy to independent republics through democratic movements a genealogy that assumes hostility to Catholicism. By centering the story on Spanish and Latin American actors, however, Voekel argues that at the heart of this nineteenth-century transformation in Spanish America was, instead, nothing less than a transatlantic Catholic civil war. Voekel demonstrates Reform Catholicism's significance to the thought and action of the rebel literati who led decolonization efforts in Mexico and Central America, showing how each side of this religious divide operated from within a self-conscious intercontinental network of like-minded Catholics. For its central protagonists, the era's crisis of sovereignty provided a political stage for a religious struggle. Drawing on ecclesiastical archives, pamphlets, sermons, and tracts, For God and Liberty reveals how the violent struggles of decolonization and the period before and after Independence are more legible in light of the fault lines within the Church.
Professor Pamela Voekel has won awards for her scholarship, her undergraduate and graduate teaching, and her efforts in collaboration with underserved students targeted by anti-migrant policies. Her second book, For God and Liberty: Catholicism and Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1780-1861 (Oxford University Press, 2022) draws on more than forty archives in six languages and ten countries to demonstrate that a religious conflict underlay the Liberal-Conservative political battles of Latin America's nineteenth century. She is also the author of Alone Before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico, which won the Thomas McGann Memorial Prize, and of multiple articles and book chapters on the intersections of religion and politics in Mexico; popular religion in Latin America; and theory and methods in transnational history. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from Harvard Divinity School, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council, among others, and she serves on the board of the scholarly series Catholic Practice in the Americas. She is the co-founder and five-time conference director of the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas, a week-long, tri-lingual seminar held annually in Mexico since 2003, and a co-founder of Freedom University Georgia, now in its second decade of providing rigorous college-level courses for the undocumented students banned from Georgia's top research universities. She also co-founded the Patrona Collective for Colonial Latin American Scholarship, in honor of the late Professor Maria Elena Martinez (1966-2014), to gather and fund graduate students in the field for archival research with senior scholars. She teaches courses on the history of colonial and modern Latin America; capitalism in the Americas; the political life of religion in Latin America; and racial and gender configurations in empire building and decolonization. At Dartmouth she is the founder and organizer of the Mississippi Freedom Writers, a scholarly seminar committed to the transnational history of the "most Southern place on earth." Their work appears in the current issue of the interdisciplinary journal Southern Cultures, co-edited and with an introduction co-authored by Voekel.
David Carrasco (Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America) is a Mexican American historian of religions with particular interest in Mesoamerican cities as symbols, and the Mexican-American borderlands. His studies with historians of religions at the University of Chicago inspired him to work on the question, "where is your sacred place," on the challenges of postcolonial ethnography and theory, and on the practices and symbolic nature of ritual violence in comparative perspective. Working with Mexican archaeologists, he has carried out research in the excavations and archives associated with the sites of Teotihuacan and Mexico-Tenochtitlan resulting in Religions of Mesoamerica, City of Sacrifice, and Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire. An award-winning teacher, he has participated in spirited debates at Harvard with Cornel West and Samuel Huntington on the topics of race, culture, and religion in the Americas. He also directs the Moses Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project at Harvard University. Recent collaborative publications include Breaking Through Mexico's Past: Digging the Aztecs With Eduardo Matos Moctezuma (2007), Mysteries of the Maya Calendar Museum (2012) with Laanna Carrasco, and Cave, City, and Eagle's Nest: An Interpretive Journey Through the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2 (2007; gold winner of the 2008 PubWest Book Design Award in the academic book/nontrade category) recently featured in The New York Review of Books. Carrasco has received the Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest honor the Mexican government gives to a foreign national. He was chosen as the University of Chicago Alumnus of the Year in 2014.