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Martha Few is an historian of Latin America, with research interests in the history of medicine and public health, Mesoamerican ethnohistory, gender and sexuality, and human-animal studies. She is author of For All of Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala (2015). This book was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2016 Bandelier/Lavrin Book Prize in Colonial Latin American History. She is also co-editor of Centering Animals in Latin American History (with Zeb Tortorici, 2013), and author of Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala (2002). Starting July 2017, she will begin a five-year term as a Senior Editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review (HAHR).
Few was recently awarded a 2017 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Collaborative Research Fellowship. Additionally, she has been a Rockefeller Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. She has also held residential research fellowships at the Newberry Library in Chicago, the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, and the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA.
Professor Few is currently writing a new book titled Insects and the Making of the New World, a history of human relationships with five insects — locusts, silkworms, bees, ants, and cochineal. She is co-authoring a monograph, a global history of the rise and spread of the postmortem cesarean operation for fetal baptism in the Spanish and Portuguese empires, with Zeb Tortorici and Adam Warren. Recently, she has completed an English translation, with critical introduction, of Pedro José de Arrese’s eighteenth-century postmortem cesarean manual with Zeb Tortorici, Adam Warren, and Nina M. Scott. This book, titled On Cesarean Operations and Fetal Baptism: An Eighteenth-Century Guatemalan Treatise in Historical Perspective, is forthcoming from the Latin American Originals series at Penn State University Press.
For All of Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala (University of Arizona Press, 2015).
Centering Animals in Latin American History, Co-editor (with Zeb Tortorici), (Duke University Press, 2013).
“Killing Locusts in Colonial Guatemala,” in Centering Animals in Latin American History, ed. Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici, (Duke University Press, 2013), 62-92.
“Introduction: Writing Animals into Latin American History,” (with Zeb Tortorici) in Centering Animals in Latin American History, ed. Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 1-27.
“Circulating Smallpox Knowledge: Guatemalan Doctors, Maya Indians, and Designing Spain’s Smallpox Vaccination Expedition, 1780-1806” British Journal for the History of Science 43:4 (December 2010), 519-537.
“Atlantic World Monsters: Monstrous Births and the Politics of Pregnancy in Colonial Guatemala,” in Vollendorf and Kostrun, eds., Gender and Religion in the Atlantic World (University of Toronto Press, 2009), 205-222.
“That Monster of Nature’: Gender, Sexuality, and the Medicalization of a ‘Hermaphrodite’ in Late Colonial Guatemala,”Ethnohistory 54:1 (Winter 2007), 159-176.
“Our Lord Entered His Body’: Miraculous Healing and Children’s Bodies in Colonial New Spain.” In Susan Schroeder and Stafford Poole, eds., Religion in New Spain: Varieties of Colonial Religious Experience(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), 114-124.
“Chocolate, Sex, and Disorderly Women in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Guatemala,” Ethnohistory 52:4 (fall 2005), 673-687.
Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala (University of Texas Press, 2002)
American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Collaborative Research Fellowship, 2018-19.
Honorable Mention, Bandelier/Lavrin Book Prize in Colonial Latin American History, for For All of Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala, 2016.
John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Interdisciplinary Cluster Fellowship, Summer 2016. For in-person collaboration on book project in process On Cesarean Operations and Fetal Baptism: An Eighteenth-Century Guatemalan Treatise in Historical Perspective, co-authored with Zeb Tortorici and Adam Warren; translated by Nina M. Scott.
University of Arizona, Provost’s Author Support Program, 2015.
Harvard University, Visiting Scholar, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, January-June 2009.
Research Professorship, Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute, University of Arizona, 2008-2009.
Newberry Library, Short Term Fellowship for Individual Research, summer 2006.
Huntington Library, Evelyn S. Nation and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowships, spring 2006.
John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Ruth and Lincoln Ekstrom Fellowship, fall 2005.