BA in Anthropology and Spanish, University of California, Davis, 1995
MA in History, University of California, San Diego, 2000
PhD in History, University of California, San Diego, 2004

Assistant Professor, University of Washington, 2004-2010
Associate Professor, University of Washington, 2010

I am a historian of Latin America and a specialist in Peru and the Andes. My research focuses on the history of medicine and the history of scientific experimentation in both the late colonial period and the national period. I am particularly interested in how medicine and science have been used to explain social inequalities and frame early modern and modern projects of population reform and “improvement” in the Andes. I explore these topics in my books and other publications on medical practices and beliefs in the Andean Region.

My first book, Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru: Population Growth and the Bourbon Reforms (Pittsburgh, 2010) examines the introduction of medical reforms as an instrument of colonial power designed to increase population size and labor productivity in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Peru. I show that by appropriating and critiquing the political rhetoric of the Spanish Crown, local doctors and officials in Lima developed a medical reform movement that they self-consciously claimed as their own, but that also engaged the broader goals of the state and sought to reverse a perceived “population crisis.” In part to position themselves as patriotic colonial subjects (at a time when their loyalty was doubted), creole (American-born Spanish) physicians, in particular, developed and introduced a variety of measures focused on preventing disease transmission, rehabilitating the weak, and curing the sick. By examining these efforts case by case, I show that such physicians’ work was rooted not only in debates with fellow practitioners and trans-Atlantic correspondence with the Crown, but also in local tensions of elite and popular political culture and religiosity. My analysis thus demonstrates the degree to which colonial subjects of all types engaged the language of reform to debate the refashioning of society.

In addition to my first book, I am the author of journal articles and book chapters on the intersection of Spanish, Indigenous, and African healing practices in the Andes. More recently, I have undertaken two projects. First, I am researching the history of racial scientific research involving highland Indigenous peoples in Peru from the late nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. As part of this project, which engages scholarship in Indigenous Studies, I am co-editing with Julia Rodríguez (UNH) and Stephen Casper (Clarkson) a forthcoming volume from Cambridge University Press on encounters, affect, and forms of relationality in the history of human sciences research. Secondly, I received an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship with Martha Few (Penn State) and Zeb Tortorici (NYU) for a project on the postmortem cesarean operation’s use for the purposes of fetal baptism in the Iberian World. We recently published Baptism Through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire (Penn State, 2020), a volume of translated eighteenth and nineteenth-century texts on this subject with a critical introduction. It is the first of two books we will complete as part of the fellowship.

My newest research examines the history of disability and slavery in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Peru and Río de la Plata, using civil cases involving enslaved litigants and owners to trace the construction of ideas about disability before modern legal understandings of the concept had come into being.

Adam Warren, Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru: Population Growth and the Bourbon Reforms, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010, https://upittpress.org/books/9780822961116/

Martha Few, Zeb Tortorici, and Adam Warren, Baptism Through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire, Penn State University Press, 2020, https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-08607-1.html

Adam Warren, Julia Rodríguez, and Stephen Casper, Empire, Colonialism, and the Human Sciences: Troubling Encounters in the Americas and Pacific, Cambridge University Press, in-press 2024, https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/empire-colonialism-and-the-human-sciences/95683BF060C2E258C09B76E1F678DD2B

“Dorotea Salguero and the Gendered Persecution of Unlicensed Healers in Early Republican Peru.” In The Gray Zones of Medicine, eds. Pablo Gómez and Diego Armus. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021, pp. 55-73. (outside peer-reviewed)

“Collaboration and Discord in International Debates about Coca Chewing, 1949-1950.” Medicine Anthropology Theory 4, no. 2 (2018), pp. 35-51. (outside peer-reviewed)

“Between the Foreign and the Local: French Midwifery, Traditional Practitioners, and Vernacular Medical Knowledge about Childbirth in Lima, Peru.” História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos 22, no. 1 (2015), pp. 179-200. (outside peer-reviewed)

“From Natural History to Popular Remedy: Animals and their Medicinal Applications among the Kallawaya in Colonial Peru.” In Centering Animals: Writing Animals into Latin American History, eds. Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013, pp. 123-148. (outside peer-reviewed)

“Medicine and the Dead in Lima: Conflicts over Burial Reform and the Meaning of Catholic Piety, 1808-1850.” In Death and Dying in Colonial Latin America, eds. Martina Will de Chaparro and Miruna Achim. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011, pp. 170-202. (outside peer-reviewed)

“Recetarios: sus autores y lectores en el Perú colonial.” Histórica 33, no. 1 (2009), pp. 11-41. (outside peer-reviewed)

“An Operation for Evangelization: Friar Francisco González Laguna, the Cesarean Section, and Fetal Baptism in Late Colonial Peru.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 83, no. 4 (Winter 2009), pp. 647-675. (outside peer-reviewed)

“La Medicina y los muertos en Lima: Conflictos sobre la reforma de los entierros y el significado de la piedad católica, 1808-1850.” In El rastro de la salud en el Perú, eds. Marcos Cueto, Jorge Lossio, and Carol Pasco. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos and Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, 2009, pp. 45-89. (outside peer-reviewed)

“Viviendas miasmáticas y enfermedades en la Lima Borbónica: Creencias populares y debates médicos sobre espacios domésticos, medio ambiente, y epidemias.” In Perfiles habitacionales y condiciones ambientales: Historia urbana de Latinoamérica, siglos XVII-XX, ed. Rosalva Loreto. Puebla and Mexico City: Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología de México—CONACYT, Deutsches Museum, and Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades de la Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2007, pp. 291-312.

“Pastoral Zeal and ‘Treacherous’ Mothers: Ecclesiastical Debates about Cesarean Sections, Abortion, and Infanticide in Andean Peru, 1780-1810.” In Women, Ethnicity, and Medical Authority: Historical Perspectives on Reproductive Health in Latin America, eds. Tamera Marko and Adam Warren. La Jolla: Working Papers Series, Paper 21, Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies, UC San Diego, 2004, pp. 5-26. (outside peer-reviewed)

“Piedad barroca, epidemias, y las reformas funerarias y de entierro en las iglesias limeñas, 1808–1850.” Horizontes 23, no. 1 (Jan-Dec 2003), pp. 7-14. (outside peer-reviewed)