Adam Warren (he/him/his)

I am a historian of Latin America and a specialist in Peru and the Andes. My research focuses on the history of medicine and the history of scientific experimentation in both the late colonial period and the national period. I am interested in how medicine and science have been used to explain social inequalities and frame early modern and modern projects of population reform and "improvement" in the Andes. I explore these topics in my books and other publications on medical practices, beliefs, and research in the Andean Region.

My first book, Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru: Population Growth and the Bourbon Reforms (Pittsburgh, 2010) examines the introduction of medical reforms as an instrument of colonial power designed to increase population size and labor productivity in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Peru. I show that by appropriating and critiquing the political rhetoric of the Spanish Crown, local doctors and officials in Lima developed a medical reform movement that they self-consciously claimed as their own, but that also engaged the broader goals of the state and sought to reverse a perceived "population crisis." In part to position themselves as patriotic colonial subjects (at a time when their loyalty was doubted), creole (American-born Spanish) physicians, in particular, developed and introduced a variety of measures focused on preventing disease transmission, rehabilitating the weak, and curing the sick. By examining these efforts case by case, I show that such physicians' work was rooted not only in debates with fellow practitioners and trans-Atlantic correspondence with the Crown, but also in local tensions of elite and popular political culture and religiosity. My analysis thus demonstrates the degree to which colonial subjects of all types engaged the language of reform to debate the refashioning of society.

Since my first book, I have undertaken two collaborative projects that have resulted in major publications. First, I received an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship with Martha Few (Penn State) and Zeb Tortorici (NYU) for a project on the postmortem cesarean operation's use for the purposes of fetal baptism in the Iberian World. In 2020 we published Baptism Through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire (Penn State, 2020), a volume of translated eighteenth and nineteenth-century texts on this subject with a critical introduction. Second, I co-edited with Julia Rodríguez (UNH) and Stephen Casper (Clarkson) a volume on encounters, affect, ethics, and forms of relationality in the history of human sciences research, which Cambridge published in November 2024. Titled Empire, Colonialism, and the Human Sciences: Troubling Encounters in the Americas and Pacific, the volume places research on the history of the human sciences in dialogue with scholarship in Indigenous and Latin American studies.

I am now starting a new project on disability and slavery in colonial Peru and Río de la Plata.