M. Kittiya Lee

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Colonial Latin America
Ph.D., History, The Johns Hopkins University, 2005

FIELD SPECIALTIES

Brazil, colonial Americas, Atlantic history, ethnicity and group identity/relations, language contact and change, translation.

BIOGRAPHY

Kittiya Lee works on communication and inter- and intra-ethnic relations in colonial Brazil and Amazonia.  Her current research, “Conversing in Colony: Language in Portuguese America, 1500-1821,” examines the major languages of communication utilized between and among Indians, Europeans, Africans and their descendants during the colonial period.  She teaches seminars and courses on the colonial history of Latin America and the Caribbean and on Indian-white relations in early North and South America.

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PUBLICATIONS

"Speaking by the Sea: Interlingual Coastal Trade in Brazil (1500-1550s)." International Reunion Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500-1800, Working Paper Series (2005): 1-33.

Contributor, entries for “Native Americans (Brazil)” & “Amazon,” Iberia and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History.  3 Vols.  Edited by J. Michael Francis.  Santa Barbara and Oxford: ABC-Clio, 2005.

“Among the Vulgar, the Erudite, & the Sacred: The Oral Life of Colonial Amazônia.”  International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500-1800, Working Paper Series, No. 04-18 (2004): 1-32.

“The arts of proselytization: music as mediator of jesuit-amerindian encounters in early Colonial Brazil, 1549-1579,” Leituras, Revista da Biblioteca Nacional 6 (Lisboa, 2000): 149-172

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