Cultures of the Americas Seminar, featuring Christina Ramos - Events Calendar
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Cultures of the Americas Seminar, featuring Christina Ramos

March 7, 3:30 pm-6:00 pm

Free

The University of Tulsa and Gilcrease Museum are pleased to announce the 2025 Cultures of the Americas Seminar hosted by the Helmerich Center for American Research. This hybrid event is free and open to the public. Seating is limited and registration is required.

Please join us for the third annual COTA Seminar, which will feature Christina Ramos, Ph.D., assistant professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis, and her award-winning book “Bedlam in the New World: A Mexican Madhouse in the Age of Enlightenment” (University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 2022). She will be joined by two guest commentators: Martha Few, Ph.D., (The Pennsylvania State College) and Rich Lizardo, Ph.D., (The University of Tulsa).

A reception will begin at 3:30 p.m., and the seminar will take place at the Helmerich Center for American Research from 4 to 6 p.m. Few and Lizardo will each offer opening comments on the book and its importance. Ramos will then respond and discuss her book. The remainder of the seminar will be devoted to public discussion about the book and its themes with the author and guest commentators.

About the book (from the publisher)

“A rebellious Indian proclaiming noble ancestry and entitlement, a military lieutenant foreshadowing the coming of revolution, a blasphemous Creole embroiderer in possession of a bundle of sketches brimming with pornography. All shared one thing in common. During the late eighteenth century, they were deemed to be mad and forcefully admitted to the Hospital de San Hipólito in Mexico City, the first hospital of the New World to specialize in the care and custody of the mentally disturbed.”

“Christina Ramos reconstructs the history of this overlooked colonial hospital from its origins in 1567 to its transformation in the eighteenth century, when it began to admit a growing number of patients transferred from the Inquisition and secular criminal courts. Drawing on the poignant voices of patients, doctors, friars, and inquisitors, Ramos treats San Hipólito as both a microcosm and a colonial laboratory of the Hispanic Enlightenment—a site where traditional Catholicism and rationalist models of madness mingled in surprising ways. She shows how the emerging ideals of order, utility, rationalism, and the public good came to reshape the institutional and medical management of madness. While the history of psychiatry’s beginnings has often been told as seated in Europe, Ramos proposes an alternative history of madness’s medicalization that centers colonial Mexico and places religious figures, including inquisitors, at the pioneering forefront.”

Awards & distinctions

  • 2022 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize (Non Women & Gender Category)
  • 2023 Philip Pauly Prize, History of Science Society
  • 2023 Cheiron Book Prize, Cheiron, the International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences
  • 2022 Bandelier/Lavrin Book Prize, Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies
  • Honorable Mention, Alfred B. Thomas Book Award, Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies
  • Shortlisted, 2023 Kenshur Prize, Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies
  • Honorable Mention, María Elena Martínez Prize, Conference on Latin American History