Stuart B. Schwartz

Professor Stuart B. Schwartz is the George Burton Adams Professor of History at Yale University. He is a leading historian of colonial slavery and religion in Latin America and major scholar of Spanish and Portuguese early modern expansion. Schwarz is the author of four major, award-winning monographs on law, religion, family, and slave society and economy. One of the most recent, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (2008), challenged the way scholars think about colonial Catholicism. Using Inquisitional records, he argues that tolerant religious attitudes, including freedom of conscience and a rejection of the exclusive validity of the Church, were widespread in Spain, Portugal, and the New World colonies. The book received multiple awards, including the inaugural Cundill International Prize in History. He edited or coedited a number of other books and is the author of over eighty scholarly articles. He served as president of the Conference of Latin American History and coeditor of the Hispanic American Historical Review. Honors include the Order of the Southern Cross (2000), Brazil's highest decoration for foreigners.