Dr. Amanda Summers is the Global Indigeneity Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen’s University. She holds a PhD in Colonial Latin American history from Temple University, a BA and MA from the University of Nevada, Reno, and was formerly the Duane H King Postdoctoral Fellow at the Helmerich Center for American Studies.
Dr. Summers’s research has been generously funded by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, John Carter Brown Library, Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, and the Fulbright Research Scholar program in Spain. She has contributed book chapters on sex work and prostitution in the seventeenth century in Histories of Sex Around the World, Routledge Research in Gender and History (2024) and The Bloomsbury Handbook of the History of World Sexualities, Bloomsbury (2026). She has two articles publishing in 2025-6: “Por Hacer Puesto Manos Violentas: An Account of Violence during a Mass in Coyoacan, 1629.” The New American Antiquarian Vol 4. (Fall, 2025) and “Género y Performatividad Emotiva de Mujeres Afro-Descendientes en las Cárceles de la Inquisición de Cartagena de Indias en el Siglo XVII.” Diversidad y Construcción Identitaria: Fluidez cultural, performatividad escrita, y legalidad en el mundo Ibérico Pacifico-Atlántico para el Anuario de Estudios Americanos (2026).
Dr. Summers’s dissertation is under revision for a manuscript titled Controlling Imperial Bodies: Inquisition, Incarceration, and Gendered Violence, 1580-1650. Controlling Imperial Bodies is about the gendered and embodied experiences of the people incarcerated by the Spanish Inquisition in the Americas in the seventeenth century, highlighting how distance trials were intimately linked. It argues that Spain attempted to control its empire by using the Inquisition to imprison people whose existence posed an economic or cultural threat to their colonial supremacy focusing on the three Inquisition prisons in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia; Lima, Peru; and Mexico City, Mexico. It challenges our understanding of early modern mass incarceration, exile, and violence through Inquisitorial operations using sources gathered from archives in the United States, Mexico, Spain, Colombia, Peru, and Vatican City examined through the lens of gender and the body. It argues for a fuller consideration of the violence and power the Inquisition wielded in the eyes of the body politic of the colonies through a long-range examination of lived experiences with surveillance, incarceration, public punishment, displacement, and disenfranchisement.
