Yanna Yannakakis

Yanna Yannakakis, Assistant Professor (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, B.A. Dartmouth College).  Social and cultural history of colonial Latin America, history of Mexico, ethnohistory and the history of indigenous peoples in Mexico.  My first book The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Duke University Press, 2008) examines how native cultural brokers negotiated with Spanish courts and the Catholic Church to open and maintain a space for the political and cultural autonomy of indigenous elites and their communities during Mexico’s colonial period.

Currently, I am working on three research projects.  “The Lienzo of Analco: Conquest Pictorial and Frontier Narrative” analyzes an indigenous pictographic manuscript that chronicles the history of a group of ‘Indian conquistadors’ who allied with Spaniards to conquer a remote region of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.  The document is a hybrid cartographic history with both European and Mesoamerican stylistic elements, thus providing insight into the early effects of conquest and colonialism on indigenous representations of space, time, history, and collective identity.  “Mexico’s Babel: Language Politics in Colonial Oaxaca” is a study of language use in the remarkably multi-lingual and multi-ethnic region of Oaxaca, Mexico.  I am particularly interested in the effects of language use on ethnic and racial hierarchies.  Finally, with Gabriela Ramos of Cambridge University, I am organizing a symposium entitled “Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in New Spain and the Andes,” from which Dr. Ramos and I will edit a collection of essays.  Our goal is to create a more comparative framework for the study of indigenous intellectual production in Spanish America.

Curriculum Vitae