Ann Twinam

In a body of books and essays on colonial Latin America, Twinam illumines the definitions of freedom and slavery, the spaces between whiteness and blackness, the contrasts between public honor and private sexuality, and the relations among groups subordinated by the casta system. Purchasing Whiteness (2015), won five major awards (including the Bolton-Johnson and the Beveridge) for masterfully giving voice to nonwhite actors in the Spanish Indies over the course of three centuries. A triumph of archival sleuthing, it explores both the fluidity of racial categories and the use of whitening petitions by people of color to escape the constraints of the colonial regime. Throughout a body of work that ranges across the fields of labor, family and gender history, she focuses on the mechanisms of civic inclusion and exclusion, and the interplay between law and everyday realities, that shaped the life-possibilities of non-Europeans.