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 particularly 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 and beliefs 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.

In addition to my first book, I am the author of journal articles and book chapters on the intersection of Spanish, Indigenous, and African healing practices in the Andes. More recently, I have undertaken two projects. First, I am researching the history of racial scientific research involving highland Indigenous peoples in Peru from the late nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. As part of this project, which engages scholarship in Indigenous Studies, I am co-editing with Julia Rodríguez (UNH) and Stephen Casper (Clarkson) a volume on encounters, affect, and forms of relationality in the history of human sciences research. Secondly, 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. We recently 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. It is the first of two books we will complete as part of the fellowship.