Biography

My name is Arielle Steimer-Barragán, I am a third-year Ph.D. graduate student at UC Irvine. I hold a B.A. in Political Science from California State University, Los Angeles. I also hold an M.A. degree in Latin American Studies from California State University, Los Angeles, and an M.A. degree in History from UC Irvine. I am also a member of the Seminario Interdisciplinario de Bibliología-Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (SIB-IIB-UNAM). I am fluent in Spanish and English and have a certificate in introductory reading of Hispanic and Novohispanic paleography. I have conducted research at the Palacio de Lecumberri in the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN).

My area of research centers the significant yet understudied role of women printers in the early modern transatlantic Iberian world, with a particular focus on Mexico and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth-century, I analyze how women printers engaged in the circulation of ideas and print culture and were involved in the material production of books and the circulation of knowledge. These women, both in Spain and the Americas, took on various roles in printed work production in an array of genres that intersected within the ecclesiastical and secular authorities. I closely examine the implications that emerged from women’s participation as owners of publishing houses, signatories of print production, recipients of print licenses, and litigants for printing privileges. A large part of my research also interrogates how women’s successes in print houses led to their establishment of new relationships with the ecclesiastical, secular, intellectual, administrative, and imperial institutions of the period in New Spain/Mexico and the broader Iberian empire.

Advisors: Dr. Renée Raphael 

Fields: Early Modern Iberian Empire and Colonial Latin America, History of the Book and History of Science/Technology within the Trans-Atlantic Iberian World