2026-27 Residency Research Fellow
About
Rochelle Rojas is a historian of early modern Spain and Latin America. She earned her PhD from Duke University in 2017 before joining Kalamazoo College in 2018. She is the author of Bad Christians and Hanging Toads: Witch Crafting in Northern Spain, 1525-1675 (Cornell University Press, 2025), which examines the inner logic of early modern witchcraft beliefs. Her recent research shifts its gaze to the Atlantic World, centering the hybrid nature – Indigenous, Iberian, mestiza, and African/Afro-descended alike – of daily life in the “New Word.”
During her fellowship, Rojas will begin her next project, “Science, Healing, and Ways of Knowing in premodern Costa Rica” which examines the understandings of science, the body, and healing technologies in early Costa Rica. This research contributes to her larger project – a comprehensive history of Costa Rica from its precolonial to Independence periods – which she will begin during her Fulbright Fellowship in Costa Rica in 2027.
