Icons and Iconoclasm: In Religion, Politics and the Academy

About the Speaker

Carlos Eire

T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University

Carlos Eire, who received his PhD from Yale in 1979, specializes in the social, intellectual, religious, and cultural history of late medieval and early modern Europe, with a focus on both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations; the history of popular piety; and the history of the supernatural, and the history of death. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1996, he taught at St. John’s University in Minnesota and the University of Virginia, and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for two years.  He is the author of War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship From Erasmus to Calvin (1986); From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth Century Spain (1995); A Very Brief History of Eternity(2010); Reformations: The Early Modern World (2016); and The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila: A Biography (2019).  And he is co-author of Jews, Christians, Muslims: An Introduction to Monotheistic Religions (1997). He has also ventured into the twentieth century and the Cuban Revolution in the memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003), which won the National Book Award in Nonfiction in the United States and has been translated into more than a dozen languages.  His second memoir, Learning to Die in Miami (2010), explores the exile experience.  A past president of the Society for Reformation Research, he is currently researching attitudes toward miracles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His recent book Reformationswon the R.R.Hawkins Prize for Best Book of the Year from the American Publishers Association, as well as the award for Best Book in the Humanities. It was also awarded the Jaroslav Pelikan Prize by Yale University Press.  All of his books are banned in Cuba, where he has been proclaimed an enemy of the state – a distinction he regards as the highest of all honors.