Chase Caldwell Smith

Biography

Chase is a historian of religious knowledge encounters between European missionaries and Nahua peoples in central Mexico in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Using textual, visual, and material evidence, Chase studies how the production, translation, and negotiation of knowledge in the religious sphere contributed to the development and contestation of early colonial society between the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Drawing on sources in Spanish, Nahuatl, and Latin, Chase’s dissertation sits 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 early modern missionary encounters, relationships between “images” and “words” in early modern religious conversion, and conversion narratives and religious self-fashioning. He has a longstanding interest 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. Current projects include a translation of a Nahuatl manuscript text discussing the ixiptla, or sacred image, of Saint Ignatius; a study of the translation and reception of the Eucharist as material and visual concept and communal ritual in central Mexico; a study of the translation of the “idol” in early colonial Mexico; the translation of a Nahuatl devotional text on Santa Catharina; a study of Inquisitorial cases concerning sacrilege and profanation of santos and santas; and a study of the transpacific reja del coro in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Mexico City. His earlier research centered on the mestiço cosmographer Manuel Godinho de Erédia and his intellectual self-fashioning as a bicultural knowledge producer in Portuguese Asia, and the visual and textual representation of sacred places in the relaciones geográficas of New Spain.

Chase holds a BA in History from Cambridge (double first class honors), an MSt in Global and Imperial History from Oxford (distinction), and an MA in History from UCLA. He is the current Lynn and Maude White Fellow (2025-26) of the UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies. 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 workshops and courses held at Dumbarton Oaks, the Library of Congress, Princeton University, the Utah Nahuatl Language and Culture Program, the California Rare Books School, the University of Wisconsin’s Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute, 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 four 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 a candidate for the Graduate Certificate in Early Modern Studies and the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities at UCLA, and is also working toward the Professional Certificate of Completion in Rare Books and Manuscripts at the California Rare Books School. He is a volunteer transcriber of sixteenth-century archival material 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 run 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 religious conversion, and the study of the Nahuatl language.