About
Allyson M. Poska is Professor of History Emerita at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. A specialist in early modern Spain, colonial Latin America, and early modern women’s history, I taught at Mary Washington for 30 years. I am the author of five books, including Gendered Crossings: Women and Migration in the Spanish Empire (New Mexico, 2016), a gendered examination of the Spanish attempt to colonize Patagonia in the 1780s that was awarded the 2016 best book prize from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. My earlier work, Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain: The Peasants of Galicia (Oxford, 2005), was awarded the 2006 Roland H. Bainton Prize for best book in early modern history or theology. My work has been funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2000 and 2019), the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (2018), the American Council of Learned Societies (2007 and 2018), and the American Philosophical Society (2018). I have been a research fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (2004) and the John Carter Brown Library (2011). I am the first CAS recipient of a UMW Waple professorship.
I am also the author of Women and Gender in the Western Past (2 vols. coauthored with Katherine French, Houghton-Mifflin, 2006) and Regulating the People: The Catholic Reformation in Seventeenth-Century Spain (Brill, 1998). I coedited The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (with Jane Couchman and Katherine McIver, Ashgate, 2013).
My new project, Maternal Judgements: Race, Gender, and Smallpox Vaccination in the Spanish Empire (1803-1810) examines the role of race and gender in the responses to the Spanish Crown’s vaccination campaign on the peninsula and across the Spanish Empire. This project has been funded by a grant from the American Philosophical Society, an American Council of Learned Societies Project Development Grant, and a CAORC/NEH Senior Fellowship.
From 2017-2024, I was coeditor of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/journals/emw/about
I am currently President of the Sixteenth Century Society and have served as a member of the executive council of the Sixteenth Century Society http://www.sixteenthcentury.org/, the executive board of the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies http://asphs.net/ , and as President of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women http://ssemwg.org/.
