Joan C. Bristol
Joan C. Bristol
Associate Professor
World History: Latin America, African Diaspora, history of commodities
Joan C. Bristol is the author of Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century (University of New Mexico Press, Diálogos series). Her articles appear in the Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación (Mexico), the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, the Journal of Africana Religions, and other publications. Her research interests include the intersection of gender and racial ideologies in colonial Spanish America, Mexican crypto-Judaism, and the history of pulque and mezcal in Mexico.
Current Research
Distilling Identities: From Pulque to Tequila in Mexico, 1428-Present
Selected Publications
“Fetishizing the Past to Imagine the Present: Mesoamerican Chocolate and Pulque in the World," LOCUS: Revista de Historia, vol. 29, no. 1, 2023
“Blackness and Blurred Boundaries in Mexico City,” A Companion to Viceregal Mexico City, edited by John López, Brill, 2021
“Colonial Community Life,” Oxford Handbook of Mexican History, edited by William Beezley, Oxford, 2020
“Health Food and Diabolic Vice: Pulque Discourse in New Spain,” in Substance and Seduction: Ingested Commodities in Colonial Mesoamerica, the Atlantic World, and Beyond, edited by Stacy Schwarzkopf and Kathryn Sampeck, University of Texas Press, 2017
"Creole Civic Pride and Positioning 'Exceptional' Black Women,” with Tamara Harvey, in Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire, eds. Mary McAleer Balkun and Susan C. Imbarrato, Palgrave, 2016
Courses Taught
History 125: Global History
History 271: Survey of Colonial Latin America
History 365: Conquest and Colonization in Latin America
History 510: Approaches to Modern World History
History 525: The Atlantic World
History 610: Study and Writing of History
Education
Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania
M.A. San Francisco State University
A.B. Bryn Mawr College
Recent Presentations
"Blood and Belonging: A Eurafrican Crypto-Jew in Seventeenth-Century Mexico,“ Rocky Mountain Conference on Latin American History, April 2025
"Alienation and Belonging in Two Diasporas: An African-Descent Crypto-Jew Navigates the Seventeenth-Century Spanish Empire,” Atlantic History Workshop at NYU, April 2023
"Ethno-Environmental Fetishization: Pulque, Cochineal, and Cacao in Colonial Mexico,” Southeastern Conference on Latin American Studies, April 2021
"Moving through Community: Examining the Travels of Esperanza Rodriguez in Seventeenth-Century Mexico,” Society for the Study of American Women Writers, November 2018
“Pulque y el fetichismo de mercancía en la época colonial,” Reunión de Historiadores de México, October 2018
“Fetishizing Health and Power: Chocolate and Pulque in Colonial Mexico,” American Society for Ethnohistory, October 2018
“Ritual and Recreation: Pulque as Metaphor in the Sixteenth Century,” Southeastern Conference on Latin American Studies, March 2018
Dissertations Supervised
David McKenzie, Racing Ahead of Manifest Destiny: U.S. Migration, Citizenship, and Commercial Expansion in Mexico's Interior, 1821-53 (2021)
John Rodriguez, A City of Chameleons: Spanish New Orleans And The Transition Of Empires, 1767-1803 (2018)