Macalester Names Tenure-Track Professor in History

St. Paul, Minn. – Karin Vélez has joined the Macalester College History Department as a tenure-track assistant professor.

Vélez received her BA from Williams College and her MA and PhD from Princeton University. She comes to Macalester from Northeastern University, where she was an assistant professor of History.

Vélez teaches a variety of courses in world history, Atlantic history, early modern Europe, and colonial Latin America. She is particularly interested in religious

encounters, comparative empire, the transoceanic spread of Catholic devotion, the experience of indigenous women on the American frontiers, and the communal formulation of myths. In researching her dissertation, “Resolved to Fly: The Virgin of Loreto, the Jesuits & the Miracle of Portable Catholicism in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World,” she followed a trail of documents from colonial and Jesuit archives in Lisbon, Seville, Madrid, Paris, Rome and Toronto, to missionary outposts in Quebec and the Bolivian Amazon.

Her most recent article “A sign that we are related to you: The Transatlantic Gifts of the Hurons of the Jesuit Mission of Lorette, 1650-1750,” was selected for publication in the peer-reviewed journal French Colonial History, Michigan State University Press, vol. 12:2011, pp. 31-44.

Her courses this year will include a class titled “Pirates, Missionaries & Translators: Between Atlantic Empires, 1450-1800,” as well as a senior seminar.

Macalester College, founded in 1874, is a national liberal arts college with a full-time enrollment of 1,985 students. Macalester is nationally recognized for its long-standing commitment to academic excellence, internationalism, multiculturalism and civic engagement.  Learn more at macalester.edu