Ruth Hill (Spanish & Humanities, Vanderbilt University)

Candidate statement

Ruth Hill (B.A., Northwestern University; M.A. and Ph.D., University of Michigan) is Professor of Spanish and Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. She came to Vanderbilt in 2012 after two years as a tenure-track assistant professor of Spanish at Columbia University, and sixteen years on the faculty of Spanish and American Studies at the University of Virginia. Currently, she teaches courses on the history of early modern science, critical race studies, and Latin American, Latinx, and American literature and culture. She has directed Ph.D. dissertations on Iberia and the Americas, 16th- 21st centuries, covering the fields of Atlantic history and literature, history of religion, history of natural history, critical science studies, critical race studies, literature (novels, short stories, drama, colonial chronicles), legal history, and rhetoric. She is the author of two books: Sceptres and Sciences in the Spains and Hierarchy, Commerce, and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America, along with numerous special issues, essays, and book chapters. Her current book, Reckoning with Race in the New World, will be published by the University of Virginia Press. It tackles the trans-Atlantic and trans-American origins of human racial categories, finding their scientific roots in animal and plant breeding practices and their religious roots in disputes over mixed-race persons, in moral theology and canon law. Her next book project, Incas, Aztecs, and Other White Men: A Hemispheric History of Hate, is a study of Aryanism in North and South America, 1850-present. A former Fulbright Scholar, Professor Hill has received grants and fellowships from numerous institutions, including the John Carter Brown Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has broad experience with government-funded research teams and government grants and fellowships councils in Spain, Germany, Mexico, the U.S., and Canada.
I would like to see us continue to support our affiliated societies and our caucuses. Additionally, I am committed to maintaining our nurturing environment for new generations of eighteenth-century teachers and scholars and, at the same time, taking advantage of their experiences with digital humanities and global studies programs. Finally, within the flexible framework of our Society, I would like to leverage my engagements abroad, with university research teams and centers, governmental grants and fellowships agencies, and libraries, to widen our international dialogues and opportunities for graduate students.