Martin Nesvig

Martin Austin Nesvig (Ph.D., Yale, 2004) is Professor of History at the University of Miami. His work examines the tensions between formal systems of imperial rule and popular culture in the early modern Spanish empire. He is author of Ideology and Inquisition: The World of the Censors in Early Mexico (Yale, 2009), Promiscuous Power: An Unorthodox History of New Spain (Texas, 2018), and editor of three anthologies on popular religion in Mexico. Currently, he is completing a book trilogy about the ways that non-native peoples (Spaniards, Basques, Canarians, Maghrebis, Senegambians, as well as mixed-ethnic peoples) adapted to Mesoamerican indigenous culture and cosmologies in post-contact Mexico. The first book is Witches and Their Hybrid Worlds in Sixteenth Century Mexico (Cambridge, 2025) which examines the processes whereby non-native women integrated Mesoamerican practices into their own magical-healing practices. He received a Guggenheim fellowship for the second book, The Xolotl Rite, which tells the stories of Spanish and mestizo men became Nahuatlized in sixteenth century Mexico. The third book Peyote, Ever Virgin, studies the ritual and quotidian adaptation of hallucinogen consumption in colonial Mexico. Currently, his research examines Sicilian cultural-linguistic self-fashioning in the context of early modern Spanish imperial rule.