Paola Uparela

Visiting Associate Professor of Women's Studies and Christianity
Paola Uparela headshot

Home Institution 

University of Florida

WSRP Project

Souls and Wombs: Women’s Labor, Miraculous Reproduction, and Colonial Biopolitics in the Transatlantic Evangelization Project

This project examines several books and manuscripts by Dominican Friar Bartolomé de las Casas (Seville c.1484 –1566) about women’s working conditions, sexual violence, menstruation and humors, pregnancy nutrition, labor pains and remedies to relieve them, and the risks of procreating at an early age, among other topics regarding Indigenous women’s labor rights.

Profile

Paola Uparela is an Associate Professor of Colonial Studies at the University of Florida, Associate Editor of the Latin American Research Review (LARR), a member of the Executive Committee of LASA Colonial, a founding member of the Societas Lascasiana, and Vice President of the Association of Gender and Sexualities Studies (AEGS). 

Uparela specializes in Early Modern, colonial, and transatlantic cultural studies; Latin American and Spanish literature; the history of medicine, art, and science; gender and sexuality studies; visual and material culture; medical humanities; Indigenous studies; and biopolitics. 

Her book, Invaginaciones coloniales. Mirada, genitalidad y (de)generación en la Modernidad temprana (Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2024), examines the emergence of visual regimes of the female body in medicine, literature, and art, as well as the historical, material, and symbolic violences that made the female body ultravisible, intelligible, and reducible to its sexual and reproductive organs. Invaginaciones coloniales has received several recognitions including the Klaus D. Vervuert Hispanic Essay Award and the SECOLAS Alfred B. Thomas Book Award.

Her publications on Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, genitality, and biopolitics have received the AEGS Victoria Urbano Award (2018), the Feministas Unidas Award (2019), and the LASA José María Arguedas Essay Award (2023).

Her research on the dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, childbirth, and sexuality received the LASA Culture, Power & Politics Award (2022).