David Tavárez
Office:
Ext: 5504
Box: 430
Email: tavarez@vassar.edu
David Tavárez received a combined Ph.D. in Anthropology and History from the University of Chicago in December 2000. Before coming to Vassar in 2003, he was the Director of Latin American and Iberian Studies at Bard College. He is a linguistic anthropologist and an ethnohistorian whose research focuses on responses to colonial evangelization, the production of texts by indigenous intellectuals, the ritual and religious worlds of Nahua and Zapotec peoples, and indigenous autonomy projects. Tavárez’s course offerings address introductory linguistics, language and culture, Mesoamerican and Andean topics, indigenous autonomy, writing systems and collective memory, and the historical ethnography of colonial hegemony. His publications include articles in The Americas, Colonial Latin American Review, Journal of Early Modern History, and Historia Mexicana, and six book chapters. Besides a book-length project that examines native responses to idolatry extirpation efforts in central Mexico, he is currently working, with support from fellowships from NEH and FAMSI, on a critical edition of the only surviving colonial corpus of collective ritual songs in a Mesoamerican language, and on a collaborative translation of an influential chronicle of the conquest of Mexico, as edited and annotated by the Nahua historian Chimalpahin.