Ganson receives Senior Research Fellowship

Barbara Ganson, Ph.D., Professor of History, and Director of Caribbean and Latin American Studies was the recipient of a Senior Research Fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College for the Spring 2017 semester. The fellowship was in the amount of $25,000 and was given for her book, a first bilingual Spanish and English edition of Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya’s The Spiritual Conquest (1639). It is one of the most important sources for understanding the encounters between missionaries, settlers, and native peoples in seventeenth-century Paraguay. It is rich for what it reveals about the process by which the Jesuits converted the Guaraní to Christianity. There was an intense struggle for dominance, resulting in the martyrdom of seven Jesuits and the creation of the early reducciones (settlements). The volume will help scholars understand Paraguay’s rich native past, as well as the Jesuits themselves, especially their struggle against Indian slavery.