Duke History

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Duke History Department

226 Carr Building (East Campus)

Box 90719

Durham, NC 27708-0719

Phone: (919) 684-2343

Fax: (919) 681-7670

    Peter H Sigal

  • Peter H Sigal

  • Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
  • History
  • 234 Carr
  • Campus Box 90719
  • Phone: (919) 684-3551
  • Fax: (919) 681-7670

  • Specialties

    • Comparative Colonial Studies
    • Gender
    • Military History
    • Medieval and Early Modern History
    • Global Transnational History
    • Cultural History
    • Global and Comparative
    • Latin America and the Caribbean

  • Research Description

    The relationships between gender, sexuality, and colonialism have intrigued me since I began my first book on Maya sexuality. I recently completed a study on the interaction of writing and sexual representation in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Nahua societies--The Flower and the Scorpion: Sexuality and Ritual in Early Nahua Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); I am currently co-editing with Neil Whitehead a volume on “ethnopornography,” the relationship between the colonial and ethnographic gaze and sexuality throughout the world; and engaging in research on the position of the hyper-masculinized Aztec warrior in early modern literature from Europe and the Americas. I have moved from studying sexual desires in indigenous communities to examining the early modern cultural processes that created global concepts of modern sexuality, gender, masculinity, and femininity.

  • Areas of Interest

    Colonial Latin America
    Indigenous Peoples of Latin America
    The History of Sexuality

  • Education

      • PhD,
      • University of California, Los Angeles,
      • 1995
      • MA,
      • University of California, Los Angeles,
      • 1992
      • BA,
      • Bucknell University,
      • 1986

  • Awards, Honors and Distinctions

      • Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Award,
      • American Society for Ethnohistory,
      • November, 2012
      • Humanities Research Institute Residential Fellowship,
      • University of California,
      • Fall, 2006
      • National Humanities Center Residential Fellowship (Rockefeller Fellow),
      • 2004 - 2005
      • Sabbatical Leave,
      • California State University, Los Angeles,
      • Fall 2002
      • Creative Leave,
      • California State University, Los Angeles,
      • Spring 2001
      • Ira Heyman Dissertation Writing Award,
      • 1994-1995
      • Teaching Fellowship,
      • UCLA,
      • 1994-1995
      • Research Assistantship,
      • Getty Center (for Professor J. Jorge Klor de Alva),
      • 1993-1994
      • Teaching Assistantship,
      • UCLA,
      • 1992-1994
      • Research Assistantship,
      • UCLA (for Professor Ellen Dubois),
      • 1991
      • NDEA Title VI Fellowship,
      • 1989

  • Selected Publications

      • The Flower and the Scorpion: Sexuality and Ritual in Early Nahua Culture.
      • Latin America Otherwise,
      • Duke University Press,
      • 2011.
      • [web]
      • "Imagining Cihuacoatl: Mexica Masculinity and Spanish Colonization."
      • Gender & History
      • 22
      • .3
      • (November, 2010)
      • :
      • 538-563.
      • (Republished in Historicising Gender and Sexuality. Kevin P. Murphy and Jennifer M. Spear, eds. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)
      • "Latin America and the Challenge of Globalizing the History of Sexuality."
      • American Historical Review
      • 114
      • .5
      • (December, 2009)
      • .
      • "Queer Nahuatl: Sahagún's Faggots and Sodomites, Lesbians and Hermaphrodites."
      • Ethnohistory
      • 54
      • .1
      • (January, 2007)
      • :
      • 9-34.
      • (Republished in Indigenous Religions. Steven Hunt, ed. London: Ashgate, 2010)
      • "Sexual Encounters/Sexual Collisions: Alternative Sexualities in Colonial Mesoamerica."
      • Ethnohistory
      • .
      • Ed. Pete Sigal and John Chuchiak.
      • 54
      • .1
      • (January, 2007)
      • .
      • "The Cuiloni, the Patlache, and the Abominable Sin: Homosexualities in Early Colonial Nahua Society."
      • Hispanic American Historical Review
      • 85
      • .4
      • (2005)
      • :
      • 555-593.
      • [web]
      • Infamous Desire: Male Homosexuality in Colonial Latin America.
      • University of Chicago Press,
      • [web]
      • "To Cross the Sexual Borderlands: The History of Sexuality in the Americas."
      • Radical History Review
      • 82
      • (2002)
      • :
      • 171-185.
      • "Gender, Male Homosexuality, and Power in Colonial Yucatan."
      • Latin American Perspectives
      • 29
      • .2
      • (2002)
      • :
      • 24-40.
      • From Moon Goddesses to Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire.
      • University of Texas Press,
      • 2000.
      • [web]
  • View All Publications

  • PhD Students

    • Caroline A. Garriott
  • background