Amber Brian, Ph.D.
Amber Brian is Associate Professor of Latin American literary and cultural studies and Chair of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Iowa.
She teaches broadly on topics related to Latin American literature and history. Her research interests include colonialism, historiography, Indigenous intellectual history, and translation studies and her publications address the movement of cultural knowledge and historical memory among Native individuals and communities as well as between those communities and the dominant political sphere in colonial Mexico. She has published widely on the mestizo chronicler don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (ca. 1578-1650). Her first book, Alva Ixtlilxochitl's Native Archive and the Circulation of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico (Vanderbilt, 2016), was awarded honorable mention for MLA’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize. In collaboration with Bradley Benton, Peter B. Villella and Pablo García Loaeza and with the support of the NEH, she edited and translated History of the Chichimeca Nation: Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Seventeenth-Century Chronicle of Ancient Mexico (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019) and with Benton and García Loaeza The Native Conquistador: Alva Ixtlilxochitl's Account of the Conquest of Mexico (Penn State Press, 2015).
She co-edited with Rocío Quispe-Agnoli Latin American Literature in Transition Pre-1492-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Her second monograph looks at questions of imperial authority, Native sovereignty, and trans-oceanic communication in sixteenth-century epistolary correspondence between king and Indigenous vassals.