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Christopher Heaney is an historian of Modern Latin America, with research interests in the history of science, indigeneity, museums, race, and deathways in the Andes, Americas, and the World. He is the author of Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones and the Search for Machu Picchu (2010), published in Peru as Las Tumbas de Machu Picchu: La historia de Hiram Bingham y la Busqueda de las últimas ciudades de los Incas (2012). He is currently at work on two monographs, both informed by research in museums and archives in Peru, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain: a cultural and material history of the collection, circulation, study, and display of Inca mummies and ancient Peruvian skulls in the Americas; and an intellectual history of the legalization of grave-robbing in Peru and the Anglo-Iberian Atlantic World.
His approach to teaching presumes a Latin America that has always been modern, and an Americas and Atlantic World shaped by movements, infrastructures, and knowledge of Native peoples. In 2012, he co-founded and was the Editor-in-Chief of The Appendix, a journal of narrative and experimental history. From 2016 to 2018 he was the Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. His work has been featured by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times.
“Seeing Like an Inca: Julio C. Tello, Indigenous Archaeology, and Pre-Columbian Trepanation in Peru,” in Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Wilner, eds., Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), pp. 344-377.
“How to Make an Inca Mummy: Andean Embalming, Peruvian Science, and the Collection of Empire,” Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society, vol, 109, no. 1 (March, 2018), pp. 1-27.
“Marrying Utopia: Richard Eden, Mary and Philip, Richard Eden, and the English Alchemy of Spanish Peru,” in Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, ed., Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), pp. 85-104.
“Fair Necropolis: the Peruvian Dead, the first American Ph.D. in Anthropology, and the World’s Columbian Exposition of Chicago, 1893,” History of Anthropology Newsletter 41 (2017).
“A Peru of Their Own: English Grave-Opening and Indian Sovereignty in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., vol. 73, no. 4 (October, 2016), pp. 609-646.
“Conquests of Peru,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History (September, 2016).
Winner, Maureen Ahern Doctoral Dissertation Award in Colonial Latin American Studies, Latin American Studies Association. 2017.
Winner, Barnes F. Lathrop Prize for Best Dissertation, History Department of the University of Texas at Austin, 2017.
First Runner-up, Richmond F. Brown Dissertation Prize, Latin American Section (LACS) of the Southern Historical Association. 2017.
Barra Postdoctoral Fellow, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. 2016-2018
Fulbright-Hays Graduate Fellow, Lima, Peru. 2012-3
Social Science Research Council, Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship. 2010.
Fulbright Student Fellowship, Cusco, Lima, Peru. 2005-6