David Tavarez

Professor of Anthropology
David Eduardo Tavarez wearing a light patterned shirt and black jacket in front of an archway.

A first-generation college graduate from Ciudad Juárez, David Tavárez is a linguistic anthropologist and a historian of Latin America. His research focuses on language, culture, and history; colonial Latin America; Mesoamerica; religion and ritual; Indigenous intellectuals; and Native Christianities. Besides more than 60 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, he is the author of Rethinking Zapotec Time (2022, Texas), which was the recipient of book prizes from LASA, NAISA, and NECLAS, and The Invisible War (2011, Stanford). He is also the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Ritual Language (2024, Oxford) and Words and Worlds Turned Around (2017, Colorado), and the co-author of Painted Words (2016, Dumbarton Oaks), and Chimalpahin's Conquest (2010, Stanford). His research has been funded by awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the John Carter Brown Library, among other sponsors. He is the co-editor of the journal Anthropological Linguistics and an editorial board member of the Journal of Native American and Indigenous Studies. His works in progress include a volume on Indigenous humanism and the production of Nahuatl devotional texts and scholarly commentary in the late sixteenth century, and a critical edition of the Proverbs of Solomon in Nahuatl, the only known Biblical commentary in an Indigenous language of the colonial Americas.

BA, Harvard University; MA, PhD, University of Chicago
At Vassar since 2003

Contact

845-437-5508
Blodgett Hall
Box 430
Hours
TBA

Research and Academic Interests

Linguistic anthropology
Latin American history
Colonial rule and resistance
Indigenous intellectuals
Cosmology and ritual

Selected Publications

BOOKS

SAMPLE PUBLICATIONS


In the Media

David Tavárez, Professor of Anthropology, was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for a project entitled Word, Time, and Resistance in Colonial Mexico: The Zapotec Books of the Cosmos. Vassar Quarterly, Spring/Summer 2017.

Interview after public lecture, organized by the Archaeological Institute of America, at the Houston Museum of Natural Science to inaugurate the exhibit The Virgin of Guadalupe: Empress of the Americas.

L.A. is known as a mecca for court interpreters, but when a defendant or witness speaks a rare dialect, officials may resort to unusual remedies. Los Angeles Times, February 21, 2009

Photos

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