Contact Information
Biography
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.
Research
Selected Research
- Adam Warren, Julia E. Rodriguez, and Stephen T. Casper, editors. Empire, Colonialism, and the Human Sciences: Troubling Encounters in the Americas and Pacific. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
- Adam Warren. “Dorotea Salguero and the Gendered Persecution of Unlicensed Healers in Early Republican Peru.” In The Gray Zones of Medicine, eds. Pablo Gómez and Diego Armus. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021.
- Few, Martha, Zeb Tortorici, and Adam Warren, Baptism through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire. State College: Penn State University Press, 2020.
- "Partnership and Discord in International Debates about Coca Chewing, 1949-1950," Medicine Anthropology Theory 4, no. 2 (2018), pp. 35-51.
- “Between the Foreign and the Local: French Midwifery, Traditional Practitioners, and Vernacular Medical Knowledge about Childbirth in Lima, Peru.” História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos 22, no. 1 (2015), pp. 179-200.
- “From Natural History to Popular Remedy: Animals and their Medicinal Applications among the Kallawaya in Colonial Peru.” In Centering Animals: Writing Animals into Latin American History, eds. Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici. Duke University Press, 2013.
- “Medicine and the Dead in Lima: Conflicts over Burial Reform and the Meaning of Catholic Piety, 1808-1850.” In Death and Dying in Colonial Latin America, eds. Martina Will de Chaparro andMiruna Achim, University of Arizona Press, 2011.
- Warren, Adam. Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru: Population Growth and the Bourbon Reforms. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010.
- “La Medicina y los muertos en Lima: Conflictos sobre la reforma de los entierros y el significado de la piedad católica, 1808-1850.” In El rastro de la salud en el Perú, eds. Marcos Cueto, Jorge Lossio, and Carol Pasco. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos and Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, 2009, pp. 45-89.
- “An Operation for Evangelization: Friar Francisco González Laguna, the Cesarean Section, and Fetal Baptism in Late Colonial Peru.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 83, no. 4 (Winter 2009), pp. 647-675.
- “Recetarios: sus autores y lectores en el Perú colonial.” Histórica 33, no. 1 (2009), pp. 11-41.
Courses Taught
Summer 2025
Autumn 2024
Winter 2024
Autumn 2023
Summer 2023
Winter 2023
Autumn 2022
Summer 2022
Spring 2022
Winter 2022
Graduate Study Areas
Division: Latin America
Students wishing to work on the Latin America field with Professor Warren may focus on any countries in the region and any time periods, although they are particularly encouraged to consider working on mainland Spanish America during the colonial and early postcolonial periods. Special emphasis will be placed on examining and understanding the historiography produced in Latin America itself, and students will be expected to articulate how such literatures differ from the anglophone historiography. With that in mind, reading knowledge of Spanish or Portuguese is encouraged, but not required.
Division: Comparative History (Comparative Colonialisms & Comparative Ethnicity & Nationalism)
The field in Comparative Colonialisms examines scholarship on Spanish and Portuguese colonialism in Latin America. While students may read on a wide range of topics of their choosing, special emphasis will be placed on exploring how the relations between colony and metropolis, the structure and practice of colonial power in the colonies themselves, and the forms of popular political culture prevalent in the colonies changed during the early, mid, and late colonial periods. Topics to be covered may include the broader colonial economic system, peasant and slave labor systems, the invention of the ~SIndian~T and other colonial identities, religious conversion as a tool of colonialism, indigenous and African religious practices, and popular resistance movements. By reading general theoretical literature on colonialism we will also examine the question how does one relate Spanish and Portuguese colonialism in Latin America to later forms of colonial rule elsewhere in the world.
The field in Comparative Ethnicity and Nationalism examines nation-building processes and the politics of race and ethnicity in Latin America, focusing primarily on the Andean region and Mexico since 1821 while also drawing on literature about Brazil for comparative purposes. Topics may include peasant and Indian nationalism, questions of citizenship and liberal equality for Indians versus the maintenance of colonial legal and political categories of race and caste, debates about the abolition of slavery and national identity, medical scientific research and debates about racial degeneration as a national problem in Latin America, ethnicity and social revolutions, and nativist "indigenista" political movements.