Paula S. De Vos
Paula S. De Vos (University of California, Berkeley, 2001) teaches Pre-Contact and Colonial Latin American history, Mexican history, and World History for Teachers. Her research interests lie in both colonial Mexico and early modern history of science and medicine. Her current project, supported by a research fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, concerns the history of pharmacy, chemistry, natural history, and medicine in colonial Mexico and is based on her dissertation, "The Art of Pharmacy in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Mexico." She is also interested in the relationship between the commercial, political, and scientific goals of the Spanish empire particularly with regard to imperial investigations into natural history and botany in the Americas and Philippines. She has written several articles in this regard, including "The Science of Spices: Empiricism and Economic Botany in the Early Spanish Empire," Journal of World History (forthcoming, late 2006/early 2007), "Research, Development, and Empire: State Support of Science in the Later Spanish Empire," Colonial Latin American Review (forthcoming, 2006), "The Spice Trade and the Colonization of the Philippines," Mains'l Haul: A Journal of Pacific Maritime History(forthcoming, 2005), and "An Herbal El Dorado: The Quest for Botanical Wealth in the Spanish Empire" Endeavour 27(3) (2003), 117-121. Professor De Vos is also one of four editors for an upcoming volume entitled Science, Power, and the Order of Nature in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires to be published by Stanford University Press.