Dr. Max Deardorff joined the department in Fall 2018 from the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt, Germany. He is a historian of colonial Latin America and early modern Iberia, especially interested in religious and ethnic minorities, identity construction, and the legal and normative framework of the early modern world. His book manuscript, Mestizos, Indios Ladinos, and ‘Arabic Christians’: Categories of Difference and Christian Citizenship in the Spanish Empire, examines the relationship between emergent early modern categories of race –expressed through the notion of “blood purity” (limpieza de sangre)—and conceptions of “citizenship” in the sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish Empire, focusing on new imperial subjects seeking enfranchisement in the frontier towns and cities of the far-flung Spanish monarchy. His articles have appeared in a variety of venues, including Colonial Latin American Historical Review, Journal of Family History, Ethnohistory, and Rechtsgeschichte-Legal History. His article “The Ties that Bind: Intermarriage between Moriscos and Old Christians in Early Modern Spain, 1526-1614” in 2018 received the triennial prize for “best early career article” in any period of Iberian history from the Association for Spanish & Portuguese Historical Studies (ASPHS). Dr. Deardorff is a former Fulbright Scholar, and has also received funding from the Nanovic and Kellogg Institutes. His Ph.D. is from the University of Notre Dame (2015).