{"id":148,"date":"2015-08-31T11:25:03","date_gmt":"2015-08-31T15:25:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/faculty\/profile\/karen-melvin\/"},"modified":"2026-02-09T16:08:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-09T21:08:11","slug":"karen-melvin","status":"publish","type":"faculty-profile","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/faculty\/profile\/karen-melvin\/","title":{"rendered":"Karen Melvin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>B.A., Boston University; Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>BIOGRAPHY<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I\u2019m a scholar of colonial Mexico and the early modern Catholic world. I\u2019m currently finishing a book about two of the first international charities: rescuing Christian captives from North Africa and maintaining a Catholic presence in the Holy Land. During the seventeenth through early-nineteenth centuries, New Spain provided more funds for these projects than anywhere else in the world, and I want to know what people there knew about these projects and why they might have cared. <\/span>I&#8217;m also starting a new book project that follows the travels of Irish Dominican William \u201cGuillermo\u201d O&#8217;Brien to Rome, New York City, Havana, and Mexico City in order to show how movement through the Catholic empire around the turn of the nineteenth century helped shape our modern world.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><strong>My publications include<\/strong>:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sup.org\/books\/extra\/?id=20050&amp;isbn=&amp;gvp=1\"><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Building Colonial Cities of God<\/span><\/i><\/a><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">: Mendicant Orders and Urban Culture in New Spain, 1570-1800.<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Stanford University Press, 2012<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u00a0<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/unmpress.com\/books\/imagining-histories-colonial-latin-america\/9780826359223#:~:text=Imagining%20Histories%20of%20Colonial%20Latin%20America%20teaches%20imaginative%20and%20distinctive,suggest%20more%20than%20they%20conclude.\"><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America<\/span><\/i><\/a><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">: Essays on Methods and Practice<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Co-edited with Sylvia Sellers-Garc\u00eda, University of New Mexico Press, 2017<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Other articles and book chapters can be found<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/scarab.bates.edu\/do\/search\/?q=melvin&amp;start=0&amp;context=10898006&amp;facet=\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> here<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I\u2019m also a principal investigator for<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.readingtheinquisition.org\/omeka\/\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Reading the Inquisition<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, a collaborative digital history project that presents inquisition cases as original documents, Spanish transcriptions, and English translations.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>TEACHING<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">My teaching encompasses a wide range of Latin America\u2019s history from Aztecs to the present day, including courses open to all students:<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>HIST\/LALS 181 Creating Latin America<\/strong>: <span style=\"font-weight: 400\">A broad overview of Latin America from indigenous societies before the arrival of Europeans through 21<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">st<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">-century globalization.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>HIST 214\/LALS 215 Revolutionary Americas, 1765-1830<\/b>: Professor Joe Hall and I team teach this class that examines s<b><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">truggles for independence throughout the American hemisphere, from Boston to Buenos Aires.\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n<p><strong>HIST\/LALS 270 The Spanish Empire: From Madrid to Manila<\/strong>: <span style=\"font-weight: 400\">A history of early globalization through the lens of the first global empire.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>HIST 295 \/ LALS 295 \/ REL 295\u00a0 Montezuma\u2019s Mexico: Aztecs and their World<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">: Students learn about what life was like for people in the Aztec empire and beliefs about how the cosmos worked.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>HIST\/LALS s27: The Mexican Revolution<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">: Students debate issues from the first major social revolution of the 20th-century.\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I also offer smaller seminar classes for sophomores, juniors, and seniors, including:<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>HIST 301Y \/ LALS 303 \/ REL 314 The Spanish Inquisition<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">: Students use Inquisition cases\u2014including for blasphemy, bigamy, and witchcraft\u2014to better understand peoples and societies of Spain and New Spain.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>HIST 301W\/LALS301W: The Cold War in Latin America<\/strong>: <span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Students research how revolutions, military coups and governments, wide-scale human rights violations, and civil wars shaped the region between the 1950s and the 1980s.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/education\/files\/2022\/06\/KarenMelvin_briefcv_June2022.pdf\"><br \/>\nCurriculum Vitae<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":655,"featured_media":2178,"template":"","class_list":["post-148","faculty-profile","type-faculty-profile","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","expertise-early-modern-history","expertise-history","expertise-history-of-religion","expertise-latin-american-history","expertise-specific-charity-and-religion","expertise-specific-colonial-mexico","expertise-specific-early-modern-catholic-world","expertise-specific-urban-history","what-i-teach-historical-methods","what-i-teach-iberian-history","what-i-teach-latin-american-history","what-i-teach-latin-american-studies","what-i-teach-specific-creating-latin-america","what-i-teach-specific-independence-of-latin-america","what-i-teach-specific-inquisition-in-spain-and-latin-america","what-i-teach-specific-latin-america-during-the-cold-war","what-i-teach-specific-latin-american-cities","what-i-teach-specific-mexican-revolution","what-i-teach-specific-montezumas-mexico-aztecs-and-their-world","what-i-teach-specific-the-spanish-empire-from-madrid-to-manila","what-i-teach-specific-travel-and-tourism-in-latin-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/faculty-profile\/148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/faculty-profile"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/faculty-profile"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/655"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/faculty-profile\/148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7203,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/faculty-profile\/148\/revisions\/7203"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}