Ivonne del Valle

Associate Professor of Colonial Studies. She received her Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in 2004, and before returning to the Bay Area in 2009, she taught at the University of Michigan. Her research and teaching make connections between the past and the present which try to show the relevance of the colonial period for an understanding of contemporary times. She was co-director of the Berkeley research group “Mexico and the Rule of Law.” She has written a book and a series of articles on the Jesuits (José de Acosta and Loyola, and Jesuits in the northern borderlands of New Spain) as a particularly influential politico-religious order that served modernization and the expansion of the Spanish empire.

She is currently working on two projects: one on the drainage of the lakes of Mexico City, and the other on the role of the colonization of Spanish America from the 15th century onward in the development of new epistemologies and political theories. In the latter she is exploring the ways in which both the unprecedented violence of conquest and colonization, and the need for effective administration of the colonies, brought about important theoretical, technological, and epistemological changes which may have been conceived to be put in place in the colonies, but which in the long run transformed the way Europe understood and fashioned itself.

Recent publications:

Escribiendo desde los márgenes: colonialismo y jesuitas en el siglo XVIII. México: Siglo XXI Editores, 2009. Print.

“Moving across Disciplines: Context, Theory and Colonial Sources.” Karen Melvin and Sylvia Sellers-García, Ed. Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America. Synoptic Methods and Practices. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017. 63-78. Print.

Co-editor, with Pedro Palou, Cardenismo: auge y caída de un legado político y social. Boston: Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, 2017. Print. http://as.tufts.edu/romancestudies/rcll/pdfs/Cardenismo_completo.pdf

“Del mito al proyecto de nación: lucha de clases y un cardenismo más allá de Cárdenas” (With Pedro Palou). Cardenismo: auge y caída de un legado político y social. Boston: Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, 2017. 9 – 29. Print.

“Loa to El divino Narciso: the Perils of Critiquing the Conquest.” Emily Bergmann and Stacey Schlau, Ed. Research Companion to the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. New York: Routledge, 2017. 214-226.

“Jesuit Enlightenment: Interventions in Christianity and Intellectualism.” Anna Nogar, José Ramón Ruisánchez and Ignacio Sánchez-Prado (ed.) A History of Mexican Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2016. 81 – 96. Print.

Co-editor, with Estelle Tarica, Radical Politics and/or the Rule of Law in Mexico. Política Común 7 (2015). Web. http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/pc.12322227.0007.001

Mexico’s Re-colonization: Unrestrained Violence, Rule of Law and the Creation of a New Order. Política común 7 (2015). Web.

Co-editor, with John D. Blanco, Carl Schmitt and the Early Modern World.  Política común Special Issue 5 (2014). Web. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/pc/12322227.0005.0*

“Reorienting Schmitt’s Nomos: Political Theology, and Colonial (and Other) Exceptions in the Creation of Modern and Global Worlds” (With John D. Blanco). Política común Special Issue 5 (2014). Web.

“José de Acosta: Colonial Regimes for a Globalized Christian World.” Santa Arias and Raúl Marrero Fente (ed.) Coloniality, Religion and the Law in the Early Iberian World. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. 2014. 3 – 26. Print.

“From José de Acosta to the Enlightenment: Barbarians, Climate Change and (Colonial) Technology as the End of History.” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 54.4 (2013): 435-459. Print.

“José de Acosta, Violence and Rhetoric: the Emergence of Colonial Baroque.” Crystal Chemris (ed.) Calíope: Transatlantic Baroque 18.2 (2013): 46 – 72. Print.

“Grandeza mexicana and the Lakes of Mexico City: Economy and Ontology in Colonial Technological Development.” Ana Maria Mutis and Elizabeth Pettinaroli (ed.) Troubled Waters. Rivers in Latin American Imagination. Vanderbilt UP- Hispanic Issues Online 12 (Spring 2013): 38 – 54. Web http://cla.umn.edu/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/hiol_12_02_delvalle_grandeza_mexicana.pdf