Biography
Nora Jaffary is a Latin Americanist whose research focuses on social and gender history in colonial and nineteenth-century Mexico. Her book, Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905 (UNC-Chapel Hill, 2016) examining midwifery, monstrous births, infanticide, abortion and the emergence of Mexican obstetrics, won the Canadian Historical Association's Wallace K. Ferguson Prize in 2017, and Honorable Mention for the Latin American Studies Association's Howard F. Cline Book Prize in Mexican History in 2018. Her new Abortion in Mexico: A History was published in 2024 in Spanish (Tirant lo Blanch) and English (University of Nebraska Press). She is currently at work with Dr. Cassia Roth, on a history of sexuality in colonial Latin America that will be published by Routledge in its Seminar Series.
Earlier in her career, she published a monograph on the Mexican inquisition’s investigation of popular religious practices, False Mystics: Deviant Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico, a volume of essays treating the comparative colonization of the Americas, Gender, Race, and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas, and two collections of primary sources in translation aimed at introducing students to Mexican history and to women's history: Women in Colonial Latin America: Texts and Contexts, 1526-1806, co-edited with Jane E. Mangan and Mexican History: A Primary Source Reader, co-edited with Edward W. Osowski and Susie S.Porter.
