Laura Ammon
is Associate Professor of Religion at Appalachian State University. She has written on the history of the comparative study of religion and on the role of sixteenth-century missionary documents in the development of theories of religion. Her work is published in the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History and the Journal of Implicit Religion. Her most recent book with co-author archaeologist Dr. Cheryl Claassen, Religion in Sixteenth-Century Mexico: A Guide to Aztec and Catholic Beliefs and Practices was published in 2022 by Cambridge University Press.
Thomas Eggensperger, O.P.
is a Dominican friar of the German province of Teutonia; he has studied theology, philosophy, and Spanish, and earned a doctorate and a master’s degree in theology. His doctoral thesis centered on Las Casas and his political philosophy. Friar Eggensperger has also authored a biography as well as various articles about Las Casas. Currently he is a professor of social ethics at the “Campus fuer Theologie und Spiritualitaet Berlin" (CTS) as well as a guest professor at the “Catholic University of Eichstaett.” He is the director of the Institute M.-Dominique Chenu Berlin.
Natsuko Matsumori
is Associate Professor of History of Political Thought at the University of Shizuoka, Japan. Since receiving her Ph.D. in Political Science at Complutense University of Madrid, she has held, among other positions, the following: Assistant Professor at Aoyama Gakuin University; Invited Professor at the University of Salamanca and at Keio University; Collaborative Researcher at Kyoto University and at the National Museum of Ethnology; Visiting Scholar at Harvard University and at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History and Legal Theory; and Screening Committee Member at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. She researches scholastic influence on the formation of early modern political thought. Her principal publications include: The School of Salamanca and the Affairs of the Indies (Routledge, 2019); From Barbarism to Order (University of Nagoya Press, 2009, Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities), and Civilización y barbarie (Biblioteca Nueva, 2005).
(JD, PhD, University of Virginia) is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Auburn University. His research explores the impact of religious and scientific ideas on early modern Spanish letters. His publications include articles on the role of grace, the sin nature, and empiricism in the literature of Miguel de Cervantes. He is currently working on a monograph that explores the nature of the sacred in Cervantes.
Luis Mora Rodríguez
is Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Costa Rica. He is the author of Bartolomé de las Casas: conquëte, domination, souveraineté, published by the Presses Universitaires de France (puf). He is interested in Latin-American decolonial theory and Caribbean philosophy.
David Thomas Orique, O.P.
is a Professor of Colonial and Modern Latin American as well as Iberian Atlantic World History, and the Director of Latin American and Latina/o Studies at Providence College. Besides a doctorate in history, he holds master’s degrees in theology, history, and Spanish literature. In addition to having lived, traveled, and conducted research in Spain and Portugal, as well as other European countries, he has engaged in investigative activities in nineteen Latin American nations. Friar David’s publications include, among others: “To Heaven or Hell: An Introduction to the Soteriology of Bartolome de las Casas” (2016); “A Comparison of Bartolome de las Casas and Fernão Oliveira: Just War and Slavery” (2014); “Journey to the Headwaters: Bartolome de las Casas in a Comparative Context” (2009); and To Heaven or to Hell: Bartolomé de las Casas’s Confessionary Roadmap to Justice and the Afterlife (Penn State University Press, 2018). He was also an editor for the Oxford Handbook of Latin American Christianity (2020) as well as Bartolomé de las Casas, O.P.: History, Philosophy, and Theology in the Age of European Expansion by Brill Publishing (2019).
María Cristina Ríos Espinosa
holds a PhD in philosophy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (unam, 2006). She is a recipient of the Medal for Academic Merit awarded by the unam School of Philosophy and Literature (2007). She completed research at the School of Philosophy of the Complutense University of Madrid (2005). She holds a master’s degree in philosophy from the unam (2001), and she has a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Panamerican University (1997). She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Mexican Association of Aesthetic
Rady Roldán-Figueroa
holds a ThD and specializes in early modern global Christianity, global Catholicism, Baptists, and the history of Christian spirituality. He is the author of The Ascetic Spirituality of Juan de Avila (1499–1569) (Brill, 2010) and The Martyrs of Japan: Publication History and Catholic Missions in the Spanish World (Spain, New Spain, and the Philippines, 1597–1700) (Brill, 2021), and co-editor of three additional volumes: with Bill Pitts, Collected Works of Hanserd Knollys: Pamphlets on Religion (Mercer University Press, 2017); with Doug Weaver, Exploring Christian Heritage: A Reader in History and Theology (Baylor University Press, 2nd rev. ed., 2017); and, with David Orique, Bartolomé de las Casas, O.P.: History, Philosophy, and Theology in the Age of European Expansion (Brill, 2019). He has published over thirty-eight articles and book chapters.
Mario Ruiz Sotelo
holds a graduate degree in sociology from the Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, and a master’s degree and a doctorate of Philosophy from the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He is a full-time professor and senior researcher at the College of Latin American Studies of the same faculty, a Professor at the Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales and a Professor at the Postgraduate in Philosophy and the Postgraduate in Latin American Studies. He has taught at the Universidad Iberoamericana and the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana. He is a member of the National System of Researchers. He authored the book Crítica de la razón imperial. La filosofía política de Bartolomé de las Casas (Mexico City, Editorial Siglo xxi, 2010) as well as more than twenty articles in various books and specialized journals. In 2006–2007, he received from the Mexican Philosophical Association its National Philosophy Award for the best master’s thesis.
directs the Pre-Columbian Studies program at Dumbarton Oaks. She was assistant professor for Anthropology of the Americas (Altamerikanistik) at the University of Bonn, where she taught courses on the ancient and colonial Americas, general and linguistic anthropology, and K'iche' Maya. Sachse holds a PhD in Linguistics from Leiden University and an MA in Anthropology, Archaeology, and English from the University of Bonn. Her research interests concern the languages, linguistics, Indigenous histories, and religions of Mesoamerica, with a current focus on aspects of translation and the hermeneutics of missionary and Indigenous text sources from Highland Guatemala. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Library of Congress, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Princeton University Library.
Rubén A. Sánchez-Godoy
is an Associate Professor of Spanish American Literature in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Southern Methodist University. His research focuses on Bartolomé de las Casas and the representations of the African captives and their descendants in the Iberian Atlantic from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. His research explores the process of production, appropriation, and transformation of those representations as part of an early critique of Atlantic slavery that precedes and overcomes the conceptual framework of the enlightened northern European abolitionism. Sánchez-Godoy recently published his book El peor de los remedios: Bartolomé de las Casas y la crítica temprana a la esclavitud Africana en el Atlántico Ibérico (Pittsburgh, PA: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2016), and the article “Nomadism and Just War in Fray Guillermo de Santa Maria’s Guerra de los Chichimecas (México 1575 – Zirosto 1580)” in Política Común (2014).
John F. Schwaller
is Professor Emeritus at the University at Albany (suny) and editor of The Americas. He is known for his work on the secular clergy in early colonial Mexico, Nahuatl language manuscripts, and a history of the Catholic Church in Latin America. Among his recent books are a study of the Stations of the Cross in Colonial Mexico (Oklahoma 2022), a study of the Aztec month of Panquetzaliztli (Oklahoma 2019), and a study of the landing of the Cortés expedition at Veracruz (Texas 2014). He assisted Stafford Poole on an English translation of a confessional manual written by the Third Provincial Council of Mexico (1585). For many years, he served as an academic administrator at various universities, including Florida Atlantic University (as Associate Dean),
Garry Sparks
is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. His research focuses on anthropological and ethnohistorical understandings of theological production in the Americas, especially of Christianities in Latin America, and particularly among Indigenous peoples. His previous publications include two books, The Americas’ First Theologies (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Rewriting Maya Religion: Domingo de Vico, K’iche’ Intellectuals, and the Theologia Indorum (University Press of Colorado, 2019). With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Academy of Religion, he is currently working on critical translations of the complete Theologia Indorum from K'iche'an Maya manuscripts.
Vanina M. Teglia
completed her PhD in colonial American literature at the University of Buenos Aires (uba), where she has been a professor and researcher at the Institute of Hispanic American Literature (ilh) since 2007. She has also been a researcher at CONICET since 2016. Her research interests lie in utopian representations of the sixteenth-century chronicles of the Indies and, recently, on myths and marvelous elements in contact and colonial American literature. She has won numerous prestigious fellowships from such entities as conicet, the Fulbright Commission, griso, the ANPCyT, the John Carter Brown Library, the Huntington Library and awards from LASA and Iberoamericana/Vervuert publishing house. She has published several book chapters and papers on colonial literature in peer-reviewed journals, as well as scholarly editions of Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación, Cristobal Colon’s Diario, cartas y relaciones, and Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima relación. She has completed a book on the controversial utopias of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and Bartolomé de las Casas—forthcoming.
Dwight TenHuisen
received his PhD in comparative literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005 with specializations in early modern colonial
Paola Uparela
is an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida. She holds a PhD in Spanish (2019) and an ma in Latin American and Iberian studies (2015) from the University of Notre Dame, and a ba in literature (2010) from the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia. Her research includes colonial and transatlantic studies, cultural studies, gender, sexuality and queer studies, visual culture, and biopolitics. Her book manuscript examines the colonial emergence of the visual regimes of the female body in medicine, literature, and art, and on the historical, material, and symbolic violence that made the female body ultra-visible, intelligible, and reducible to the sexual and reproductive organs and functions. She was recognized with the Victoria Urbano Award by the Association of Gender and Sexualities Studies (2018), the Feministas Unidas Essay Prize (2019), and the LASA - Culture, Power & Politics Section Award (2022), for her work on Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s representation of Indigenous nudity (1615), and his claim against mestizaje and sexual violence. Uparela has published in journals such as H-Art, Hispanic Issues, Revista Iberoamericana, A contracorriente, and Lingüística y Literatura.
Ramón Darío Valdivia Jiménez
holds a PhD from the Lateran University of Rome (2008) and a J.D from the University of Seville (2020). Currently, in addition to attending a parish in Seville, he teaches at the Faculty of Theology “San Isidoro de Sevilla” and at the Center for Higher Studies of the Fundación San Pablo-CEU Cardenal Spínola. His publications are aimed at studying and reflecting on bioethical problems and the influence of Bartolomé de Las Casas in the philosophical and legal fields. His published monographs include Called to the Peaceful Mission. The
Andrew L. Wilson
is a Professor of Church History at Japan Lutheran College and Seminary. He received his PhD in church history from Princeton Theological Seminary with a focus on Las Casas and the question of African slavery. He has published dozens of book reviews and articles on subjects as varied as late antiquity and evolutionary anthropology. His award-winning book, Here I Walk, narrates his 1,000-mile pilgrimage to Rome in the footsteps of Martin Luther.
Victor Zorrilla
holds a PhD in philosophy from the Universidad de Navarra (2009) and teaches the history of political thought at the Universidad de Monterrey (México). His research has focused on the debates concerning Indian rights and the justification of conquest in early modern Spain. His publications include a book on Las Casas’s notion of the state of nature, El estado de naturaleza en Bartolomé de las Casas (Pamplona, 2010), and several articles on Las Casas, José de Acosta, Juan de Silva, and other Spanish authors. He is currently researching the adaptations of the just war theory in sixteenth-century Spanish American thought.