James Wadsworth

Biography

Professor of History James Wadsworth is a historian of Colonial Latin American and World History. He is interested in the linkages between social, institutional, and religious history, indigenous history, piracy, and the big historical questions that defy easy answers.

His first book, entitled Agents of Orthodoxy: Honor, Status and the Inquisition in Colonial Pernambuco Brazil (2007), is a collective biography of the men who ran the Inquisition between 1613 and 1821 in the Captaincy General of Pernambuco. His second book, In Defence of the Faith: Joaquim Marques de Araújo A Comissário in the Age of Inquisitional Decline (2013), shrinks the historical scale by engaging in an experiential microhistory of the career of one formidable comissário who worked between 1770 and 1820. He is also the author of Columbus and His First Voyage: A History in Documents (2016); The World of Credit in Colonial Massachusetts: James Richards and His Daybook, 1692-1711 (2017), and Global Piracy: A Documentary History of Seaborne Banditry (2019).

Currently, he is researching cross-cultural exchange in the western hemisphere following Columbus’s voyage. This work is entitled A Circle of Hands: An Ethnography of Light and the Gift at the Edge of History. Future projects may include a history of piracy on the Brazilian coast, a global history of archery, and shorter works exploring the Inquisition’s relations with religious orders in colonial Pernambuco and indigenous priests in colonial Brazil. He has held several prestigious fellowships including a Fulbright Fellowship to Portugal and regularly presents papers at international conferences. He is also the recipient of the Chet Kevitt Award for his book The World of Credit in Colonial Massachusetts: James Richards and His Daybook, 1692-1711.

Education

• Ph.D., Latin American & Comparative World History, University of Arizona
• M.A., Latin American Studies, University of Arizona
• B.A., History, Idaho State University

Courses Taught

• World History I
• World History II
• Colonial Latin America
• Modern Latin America
• History of Brazil
• Native American History
• Approaches to World History
• Comparative Empires: Spain and Portugal
• Inquisition: Myth and History
• A World at War
• A Global History of Piracy
• Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration
• You Are What You Eat: A Global History of Food