Award-Winning Scholarship on Latin America

Rolena Adorno, the Ruben Post Halleck Professor of Spanish and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Stuart B. Schwartz, the George Burton Adams Professor of History and the Chair of the Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies

Two Yale professors have been recognized for their outstanding contributions to Latin American literary studies and history. Rolena Adorno, the Ruben Post Halleck Professor of Spanish and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, was nominated by President Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to the National Council on the Humanities.

Professor Adorno is an expert on literary cultural production in colonial Latin America. In The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative (2007), she situates the canonical works of 16th- and 17th-century Spanish and Amerindian writers within the Spanish American narrative tradition. She considers how subsequent generations of Latin Americans polemically reinvented these colonial authors and their subjects. The Polemics of Possession won the Katherine Singer Kovas Prize of the Modern Language Association for an outstanding book on Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures.

Stuart B. Schwartz, the George Burton Adams Professor of History and the Chair of the Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies, has published extensively on the history of Spain, Portugal, and their New World colonies. His most recent book, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (2008), uncovers a surprising history of tolerance in the era of the Catholic Reformation. This transnational study uses Inquisition records from Europe and the Americas to illuminate the beliefs of common people and their challenges to religious orthodoxy.

All Can Be Saved won three prizes from the American Historical Association, for the best book in the intellectual and cultural history of Europe, in 17th- and 18th-century western European history, and in the history of Spain, Portugal, or Latin America. The book also received the world’s largest nonfiction prize, McGill University’s Cundill International History Prize, as well as the American Academy of Religion Book Award for Historical Study and the Bolton-Johnson Prize of the Conference of Latin American History. Professor Schwartz previously won the Bolton-Johnson Prize for Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society (1985).