Stuart Schwartz

Stuart Schwartz, a member of the Yale faculty from 1996 to 2024, was the George Burton Adams Professor of History and served as chair of the Council on Latin American & Iberian Studies. He received his PhD from Columbia in 1968 and specializes in the history of colonial Latin America, especially Brazil, and on the history of early modern expansion. Among his books are Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil (1973), Early Latin America (1983), Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society (1985), Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels (1992), and All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (2008). He edited several works including A Governor and His Image in Baroque Brazil (1979), Implicit Understandings (1994), Victors and Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico (2000), and The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of The Americas, Vol. 3: South America, Part 2 (1999).

His scholarship was recognized with a number of distinctions including the Cundill International Prize in History, the American Academy of Religion Book Award for Excellence in the category of Historical Study of Religion, and three prizes awarded by the American Historical Association. Twice (in 1985 and 2009) he received  the Bolton-Johnson Prize awarded by the Conference on Latin American History.

Professor Schwartz served as the head of Ezra Stiles College. He is currently working on several projects: a history of independence of Portugal and the crisis of the Iberian Atlantic, 1620–1670; and a social history of Caribbean hurricanes.