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Claudia Ruth Brosseder

Profile picture for Claudia Ruth Brosseder

Contact Information

309 Gregory Hall
810 S. Wright Street
Urbana, IL 61801

Associate Professor

Research Interests

My research engages ethnohistory, archaeology, and art history (among other disciplines) to reconstruct prehistoric and early colonial Andean ontologies, animacies, and human-animal relations. I have published books on the history of early modern astrology, Andean wak’a, and Inka relationships with birds. My most recent publication, “Inka Bird Idiom. Amazonian Feathers in the Andes” (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023) adds new dimensions to how we currently talk about the Inkas and their engagement with nature, the cosmos, and Amazonia.

Education

Ph.D.: Munich University, Habilitation: Munich University

Additional Campus Affiliations

Associate Professor, History
Associate Professor, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Recent Publications

Books:

Brosseder, C. (2023). Inka Bird Idiom: Amazonian Feathers in the Andes. (Pitt Latin American Series). University of Pittsburgh Press.

Brosseder, C. (2014). The Power of Huacas: Change and Resistance in the Andean World of Colonial Peru. Austin: University of Texas Press (American Academy of Religion, Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, 2015).  

Brosseder, C. (2018). El poder de las huacas. Cambios y resistencia en los Andes del Perú colonial. Arequipa: Ediciones El Lector (Spanish edition of The Power of Huacas).  

Brosseder, C. (2004). Im Bann der Sterne: Caspar Peucer, Philipp Melanchthon und andere Wittenberger Astrologen (Under the Spell of the Stars: Caspar Peucer, Philipp Melanchthon, and other Wittenberg Astrologers). Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.

 Articles: 

Brosseder, C. (2019). “Unsettling and Unsettled Readings: Occult Scripts in Sixteenth-Century Lima and the Challenges of Andean Knowledge.” In A Companion to Early Modern Lima, edited by Emily Engel, 275-308. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers.

Brosseder, C. (2018). “The Conquest of the Andes from Andean Perspectives.” In The Andean World, edited by Linda Seligman and Kathleen S. Fine-Dare, 161-174. London: Routledge, 2018.  

Brosseder, C. (2018). “Secularizing the Andes. The Effects of Transcultural Processes on Colonial Andean Rituals.” In The Rites Controversies in the Early Modern World, edited by Pierre Antoine Fabre and Inés G. Županov, 301-321. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers.

Brosseder, C. (2017). “To Make Christianity Fit: The Process of Christianization from an Andean Perspective.” In Words and Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America, edited by David Tavárez, 220-241. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.

Brosseder, C. (2016). “El papel de la biblia en la evangelización de los pobladores andinos (siglos XVI y XVII).” In La Biblia en la literatura hispanoamericana, edited by Geneviève Fabry and Daniel Attala, 51-68. Madrid: Editorial Trotta.

Brosseder, C. (2016). “Bernabé Cobo’s Re-Creation of an Authentic America.” In God and the Enlightenment, ed. William Bulman and Robert Ingram, 83-106. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Brosseder, C. (2014). “El alcance de los poderes de ‘guacas’ y de ‘camascas’ en los Andes. Una interpretación etnohistórica y arqueológica.” In Nuevo Mundo. Mundos Nuevos (Las conexiones temporales, regionales y transatlánticas de los Andes y la Amazonía: Personas y objetos como actores de una historia entrelazada,”edited by Ingrid Kummels and Karoline Noack), http://nuevomundo.revues.org/67115

Brosseder, C. (2012). “Cultural Dialogue and Its Premises in Colonial Peru: The Case of Worshipping Sacred Objects.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (special edition edited by Corinne Lefèvre and Inés G. Županov) 55: 169–200.  

Brosseder, C. (2010). “Astrology in Seventeenth-Century Peru.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological & Biomedical Science 41: 146–57.  

Brosseder, C. (2010). “La ciencia entre la herejía y la adaptación: Astrología natural y talismánica en el Perú colonial, siglos XVI–XVII.” In Catequesis y derecho en la América colonial: Fronteras borrosas, ed. Roland Schmidt-Riese, 19-41. Madrid: Vervuert-Editorial Iberoamericana. 

Brosseder, C. (2005). “The Writing in the Wittenberg Sky: Astrology in 16th-Century Germany.” Journal of the History of Ideas 66: 557–76.