About Heather Peterson

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Heather Peterson is primarily interested in the way society answers the question “how to live?” Her recently completed dissertation looks at this question in relation to the conquest and subsequent depopulation of Mexico. Focusing on the intersection between the moral and the natural in Spanish discourse on belonging and Indian mortality, she traces the way Spaniards imagined their relationship to the land and its resources. Her work contributes to a new trend in environmental history that sees the body as a mediating point between culture and environment, and to the larger history of identification. Heather received her B.A. (1996) in history at Montana State University in her hometown of Bozeman, MT, and her M.A. (2003) and Ph.D. (2009) in history at the University of Texas at Austin. She has conducted extensive research at the AGI in Seville, the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid and the AGN in Mexico City. This research has been funded in part by the Tinker Foundation, the University of Texas, the Embassy of Spain, and Fulbright/Garcia Robles. In 2009 she participated in the Harvard Atlantic World Seminar on the history of medicine and technology in the Atlantic World. She is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (2010) in Berlin, and will be continuing her research at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University during the spring of 2011.

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