Nancy E. van Deusen

Nancy E. van Deusen is a historian of colonial Andean, Latin American, and early modern Atlantic World history. She specializes in the histories of slavery in the Iberian world, and gender relations and female Catholic spirituality in colonial Peru. Her third book, Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Duke University Press, 2015), examines slaves labeled as indios who pressed for their freedom in Spanish courts in the sixteenth century. By expanding the significations of the category indio/a, the book asks readers to think globally about a construct that has informed the foundations of colonial Latin American scholarship.

Her fourth monograph, Embodying the Sacred (Duke University Press, 2017) captures the vibrant confessional world of seventeenth-century Lima and explores the textured sense of pious women’s lives: including their positionality vis-à-vis self and others, and their engagement with sacred objects, including written texts, the body in ecstasy, and relics.

She now turns her attention again toward indigenous slavery. A five-year SSHRC Insight Grant will aid in the researching and drafting of “The Disappearance of the Past: Native American Slavery and the Making of the Early Modern World,” a book that will answer the question of why the ubiquitous practice of Native American slavery in the western hemisphere and beyond has disappeared from our narratives about the past. She takes an ethnographic approach to “slavery’s archive,” to show how erasures, re-inscriptions, and taxonomies have helped to create this monumental absence.

She is the recipient of the 2019 Queen's University Excellence in Research Award. In recognition of her research achievements, Professor van Deusen was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2020.

In 2023 she was a Research Fellow at All Soul's College, Oxford University.

She welcomes students working on all aspects of colonial Latin American or early modern Iberian history, from a local and/or global perspective. She is particularly interested in supervising projects that inform her own research interests on the history of the production of knowledge (including the history of Indigenous slavery, archives, and the law), and the histories of gender and spirituality. 

Principal Fields for Graduate Supervision: Early Modern Global, Atlantic World, and Iberian History, 1450-1800; Colonial Latin America; pre-1800 Andes, critical histories of the production of knowledge; historical theory; archives and history; Indigenous slavery; legal regimes of bondage, race and gender history; female Catholic spiritualty, healing and magic, the Inquisition and Inquisitorial practices, material religious culture. 

Current Graduate Students: Megan Griffiths (Ph.D.), Alanna Loucks (Ph.D. co-supervisor), Naomi Makowska (Ph.D., co-supervisor), Iman Mansour (Ph.D., co-supervisor), Aleksandra Ujejska (M.A.), Josephine Vitella (M.A.).