Camilla Townsend

Camilla Townsend,a Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University, specializes in early Native American and Latin American History and early American history. She is interested in indigenous peoples—and in relations between natives and newcomers—throughout the Americas. Her publications have spanned Mexico, the Andean Region, and the Chesapeake. She is deeply immersed in the study of Nahuatl, the Aztec language, and is focused closely on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings left to us by Native American historians. Through the historical annals they produced, she recognizes glimpses of indigenous conceptualizations of history as they existed at first contact.

Her books have earned numerous prizes. Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs won the Cundill Prize for History in 2020. Townsend's other books include Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive, which is based on colonial Mexico's Nahuatl-language annals that were written by Indians of Mexico but also for Indians, without regard to European interests. She deduced the authorship of the texts and set them into their original contexts.

Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Commission, the American Association of University Women, the American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and most recently, the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress.