Carina Johnson

  • Peter and Gloria Gold Professor of History
  • History Field Group
Office Location

Bernard 221

Office Hours
Contact Professor

With Pitzer Since: 2002

PhD, University of California, Berkeley, History
MA, University of California, Berkeley, History
BA, Yale College, summa cum laude, Archeological Studies and History

Professor Johnson’s research is closely related to the courses that she offers. Her current research focuses on cross-cultural encounters, proto-ethnography, memory, and the experience of violence in the sixteenth-century Habsburg Empire. She is also interested in questions of material and visual culture, religious and cultural identities, and theorizing colonialism in the early modern era. Her work has been supported by grants from the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the American Academy in Berlin (Nina Maria Gorrissen Fellowship), John Carter Brown Library (NEH Fellowship), and the Huntington Library (Barbara S. Thom Fellowship).

The World Since 1492 (HIST/ANTH11) with Professors O’Rourke and Segal

Things (ARHI186T) with Professor Anthes

Oceania and Globalism: Hawai’i and Tonga (ASAM189) with Professor Yep

Thinking the Impossible: Gender and Utopia in European and U.S History (First Year Seminar)

Pandemic Histories: The Decameron and Life after the Black Death (First Year Seminar)

Travel and Encounter, 1200-1800 (HIST64)

The Sixteenth-Century Problem with Profit (HIST73)

Queering the Medieval? Holiness, Heresy, and the Body (HIST74), cross-listed with GFS

Empire and Sexuality: Gender, Nations, British and French Colonialism (HIST134), cross-listed with GFS, IDAAS

Hybrid Identities: Spain, Spanish America, and the Philippines (HIST170), cross-listed with RLST

Religion, Violence, and Tolerance, 1450-1650 (HIST173), cross-listed with RLST

Magic, Heresy, and Gender in the Transatlantic World, 1400-1700 (HIST175), cross-listed with GFS, CGS, RLST

Information Revolutions x.0 and z.0: the Printing Press and the Internet (HIST/POST185), with Professor Herrera

The Seminar in History (HIST197)

Books

Archeologies of Confession: Writing the German Reformation, 1517-2017, with co-editors David M. Luebke, Marjorie E. Plummer, and Jesse Spohnholz. New York: Berghahn Press, 2017(hb) and 2019 (pb).

Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: the Ottomans and Mexicans. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011(hb) and 2014 (pb).

Special Issue

“Multiplicities: Recasting the Global Early Modern,” special issue of Modern Philology 119.1 (August 2021), co-edited with Ayesha Ramachandran.

Articles

“The Jaguar’s Beer: Critical Approaches to Multiplicity in the Early Modern World,” co-authored with Ayesha Ramachandran, Modern Philology 119.1 (August 2021): 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1086/715120

“Naming the Turk and the Moor: Prehistories of Race,” in Names and Naming in Early Modern Germany, edited by Marjorie Beth Plummer and Joel F. Harrington. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019.

“Putting Europe in Its Place: Material Traces, Interdisciplinarity, and the Recuperation of the Early Modern Extra-European Subject,” co-authored with Catherine Molineux, Radical History Review 130 (2018): 62-99. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-4217898

“Heritable Identity Markers, Nations, and Physiognomy,” in The Routledge History of the Renaissance, edited by William Caferro. London: Routledge Press, 2017.

“Imperial Succession and Mirrors of Tyranny in the Houses of Habsburg and Osman,” in Rivalry and Rhetoric in the Mediterranean, edited by Barbara Fuchs and Emily Weissbourd. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015.

“Forum: Globalizing Early Modern German History,” German History, vol. 31, no. 3 (September 2013).  With Renate Dürr, R. Po-Chia Hsia, Ulrike Strasser and Merry Wiesner-Hanks.

“Aztec Regalia and the Reformation of Display,” in Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, edited by Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C. Mancall. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

“Stone Gods and Counter-Reformation Knowledges,” in Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe : Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400-1800, edited by Pamela H. Smith and Benjamin Schmidt. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008.

“Some Peculiarities of Empire in the Early Modern Era,” in Politics and Reformations: Communities, Polities, Nations, and Empires: Essays in Honor of Thomas A. Brady, Jr., edited by Christopher Ocker, Michael Printy, Peter Starenko, and Peter Wallace. Boston: Brill, 2007.

“Idolatrous Cultures and the Practice of Religion,” The Journal of the History of Ideas 67.4 (2006): 597-621.