"...we interrogate how different kinds of historical actors gave meaning to the operation and to baptism as they received instruction and implemented them in distinct colonial settings."
Adam Warren (History) was awarded a collaborative research grant from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) for his research with Martha Few (Penn State) and Zeb Tortorici (NYU) on Postmortem Cesarean Operations and the Spread of Fetal Baptism in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires.
More on the book project:
This project traces the networks of Spain's and Portugal's empires that allowed for the introduction and global spread of the postmortem cesarean operation for the purpose of baptizing the unborn fetus during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although scholars have written histories of the operation, these have been geographically limited in scope. Looking at Europe, the Americas, and the Philippines, we interrogate how different kinds of historical actors gave meaning to the operation and to baptism as they received instruction and implemented them in distinct colonial settings. Combining approaches from ethnohistory, gender and sexuality studies, history of medicine, and archival theory, we show how the procedure generated new ideas about women and unborn fetuses as colonial subjects across different imperial spaces.
Adam is part of the Simpson Center research project on Humanistic Perspectives on Global Health Partnerships. He was also a member of the 2008-2009 Society of Scholars, where he worked on his book Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru: Population Growth and the Bourbon Reforms (2010).
Congratulations, Adam!