Proposals for scholarly papers concerning death and dying in colonial and early modern Latin America (approximately 1540-1850) are solicited for an edited volume that aims to expand awareness of original scholarship on Latin America. Toward that end, we issue this call for book chapters and materials for an edited collection, to be submitted for consideration to a university press.

The study of death and dying opens up terrain where a variety of practices, as well as cultural and professional assumptions meet, to provide ways of answering important questions about the intersections of cultures in the Americas. What were the relationships between the worlds of the living and the dead and how were these relationships sustained, not just through religious notions and concepts, but through everyday practices? How were social and political hierarchies reinforced through death-related rituals? How did newly-emerging scientific practices (hygiene, surgery, anatomical dissections, autopsies, clinical medicine, demographic censuses and popular arithmetic) represent dying and the dead? How did demographic and cultural changes impact mourning? To what extent did deathways remain localized? Did fictitious funerals serve as cultural and political unifiers in pre-national societies?

We welcome submissions focusing on any topic – cemeteries, deathways, mourning, disease, capital punishment, relics, etc. – that falls within the timeline identified from scholars of any rank, provided that the research is based on original archival research and has not previously been published elsewhere in English – or prior to 2002 in Spanish. Scholarship that is interdisciplinary in nature and/or which reflects on a wide series of discourses and practices, ranging from medicine, literature, literature, science, anthropology, philosophy, is likewise encouraged.

PROPOSALS: 250-500 word abstract (and full essay if already written), select bibliography, and brief biographical statement, including present institutional affiliation, to both editors via e-mail:
 Dr. Miruna Achim, Universidad Autónoma
Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa, kimichintli@gmail.com
 Dr. Martina Will de Chaparro, Texas Woman’s University, mwill@mail.twu.edu
Please note that since the target audience – and interested publisher – are based in the U.S., all submissions must be in English.

DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: April 15, 2008. Completed essays will be due Summer 2008, and will be expected to be 25-35 double-spaced pages in length.