Ph. D., Princeton University
Spain and the Colonial Americas and the early modern Spanish Atlantic World
| 237 Meserve | E: k.velez@neu.edu |
Karin Velez teaches courses in world history, Atlantic history, early modern Europe, and colonial Latin America. She is especially interested in religious encounters, comparative empire, the transoceanic spread of Catholic devotion, the experience of indigenous women on the American frontiers, and the communal formulation of myths. In researching her dissertation, "Resolved to Fly: The Virgin of Loreto, the Jesuits & the Miracle of Portable Catholicism in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World," she followed a trail of documents from colonial and Jesuit archives in Lisbon, Sevilla, Madrid, Paris, Rome and Toronto, to missionary outposts in Québec and the Bolivian Amazon. Currently she is researching how Catholicism in the late 1600s was carried to new sites by refugees including Slavs from coastal Dalmatia, the Huron of Canada, and the Moxos Indians of Peru. She is also investigating the role of weeping and physical displacement in religious belief.