Chase Caldwell Smith

Biography

Chase is a historian of religious knowledge encounters between European missionaries and Nahuatl-speaking peoples in early modern central Mexico, in the context of the early modern global history of the Iberian World. His dissertation, “Contentious Matters: Translating the Material and Visual Sacred in Early Modern Mexico, 1517-1640s,” investigates debates over the capacity of materia sacra (powerful, numinous images, things, substances, and bodies) to legitimately channel the sacred. This project is based on the study of diverse primary sources from over a dozen libraries and archives in Mexico, the USA, and Spain, including printed and manuscript devotional books in Spanish, Nahuatl, and Latin, passages from the Florentine Codex and other early colonial codices, printed ecclesiastical chronicles and handwritten epistolary correspondence, and inquisitorial cases involving the sacrilege and profanation of saintly images and bodies. Through the study of these sources, Chase uses controversies over how to translate, worship, and understand powerful physical things as a method to situate central Mexico within a wider context of global confrontations between an expanding, militant early modern Catholicism and the local religions that this ideological system sought to supersede, study, and transform. By recentering material and visual religion in the history of the first globalization, he argues that we can gain a more profound sense of the entanglement of religion, empire, and the production of knowledge in the early modern world.

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 incoming E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Fellow in Early American Religious Studies (2026-27) of the McNeil Center at UPenn, 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 Society for Ethnohistory, the Renaissance Society of America, the Omohundro Institute, the John Carter Brown Library, the Bancroft Library of UC Berkeley, Princeton University Library, the Conference on Latin American History, the Rare Book School, the American Historical Association, and the Clarendon Fund at the University of Oxford. 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 5 multidisciplinary conferences as an officer of the UCLA Medieval and Early Modern Student Association on diverse themes of interest to global pre-modernists, including translation, hybridity, materiality, frontiers, and intersectionality. 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 16th-century archival texts pertaining to Indigenous slavery and freedom for the public digital humanities project, Native Bound, Unbound: Archive of Indigenous Slavery. He welcomes inquiries regarding graduate study of history at UCLA on colonial Latin America, the early modern global Iberian empires, early modern global Catholicism and missionaries, the Spanish transpacific, and the study of the Nahuatl language (both Older and Modern).