Chase Caldwell Smith

Biography

Chase is a historian of religious knowledge encounters between European missionaries and Nahuatl-speaking peoples in central Mexico in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the context of the early modern global history of the Iberian World. In his dissertation, Chase studies how Nahuas and ecclesiastics, primarily from the Franciscan and Jesuit orders, translated, negotiated, and contested santos and santas (saints) between the early sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. Drawing on textual sources in Spanish, Nahuatl, and Latin, as well as visual and material evidence, Chase’s project intervenes at the crossroads of colonial Latin American history, ethnohistory, Ibero-American art history, and studies of early modern global Catholicism. His broader interests include race and religion in the early modern Iberian empires, epistemologies of knowledges produced in global missionary encounters, and conversion narratives and religious self-fashioning produced by the diverse peoples negotiating their participation in the global Habsburg monarchy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is also interested in the early modern Spanish transpacific, and in the hybrid people, images, and objects that circulated between colonial Latin America and Iberian Southeast Asia along the routes of the Manila Galleon. His recent paper, “Casting Out Demons with a Sacred Image: The Ixiptla of Saint Ignatius of Loyola in a Nahuatl Narrative of Bancroft MM 464,” was honored with the 2025 Helen Hornbeck Tanner Best Student Conference Paper Award from the American Society for Ethnohistory.

Chase holds a BA in History from Cambridge (double first class honors, 2017), an MSt in Global and Imperial History from Oxford (distinction, 2018), an MA in History from UCLA (2021), and a Graduate Certificate in Early Modern Studies from the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies (2025). He is the current Lynn and Maude White Fellow (2025-26) of the UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, and previously an Academic Year FLAS Fellow in Nahuatl (2023-24) of the UCLA Latin American Institute. His research and professional development have been supported by the American Historical Association, the American Society for Ethnohistory, the Renaissance Society of America, the John Carter Brown Library, the Bancroft Library of UC Berkeley, Princeton University Library, the Conference on Latin American History, the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies, the UCLA Latin American Institute, the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies, the California Rare Book School, the Clarendon Fund at the University of Oxford, and Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. His historical training at UCLA has been enhanced by participation in the Missionary Manuscripts in Mesoamerican Languages Summer Workshop, the Utah Nahuatl Language and Culture Program, the California Rare Books School, the University of Wisconsin’s Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute, the University College London Early Modern Dutch Course, and the Sin Barcos Spanish Paleography Institute. He has taught undergraduate sections in survey courses on colonial Latin American History, modern Western civilization, medieval and early modern world history, and the early modern history of science.

Beyond his studies, Chase has worked as producer and presenter for the Global History Podcast, a digital humanities project dedicated to sharing global approaches to the early modern period. He has co-organized 4 multidisciplinary conferences as an officer of the UCLA Medieval and Early Modern Student Association, and worked as Graduate Coordinator of the cross-area studies UCLA Pacific World Research Network. He is working towards the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities from the UCLA Digital Humanities Program and the Professional Certificate of Completion in Rare Books and Manuscripts from the California Rare Books School. He is a volunteer transcriber of sixteenth-century archival texts pertaining to Indigenous slavery and freedom for the public digital humanities project, Native Bound, Unbound: Archive of Indigenous Slavery. He has collaborated with the Nahuatl Working Group at Yale to teach an object session with colonial Mexican and Nahuatl language materials at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. He welcomes any inquiries regarding graduate study of history at UCLA on colonial Latin America, the early modern global Iberian empires, early modern global Catholicism and missionaries, and the study of the Nahuatl language (both Older and Modern).