Burns, Kathryn (Jane) 1959-

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BURNS, Kathryn (Jane) 1959-

PERSONAL: Born 1959. Education: Princeton University, A.B. (history; summa cum laude), 1981; University of Texas, M.A. (Latin American studies), 1984; Harvard University, A.M. (history), 1988, Ph.D. (history), 1993.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Department of History, C.B. No. 3195, Hamilton Hall, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3195. E-mail—kjburns@email.unc.edu.

CAREER: Ford Foundation, researcher in New York, NY, 1984-85, assistant program officer in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1985-87; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, teaching fellow, 1989-90; University of Florida, Gainesville, assistant professor, 1993-2000, associate professor of history, 2000; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, assistant professor, 2000-02, associate professor of history, 2002—.

MEMBER: Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fulbright grant, 1981-82; fellowships and prizes from University of Texas, Harvard University, University of Florida, and Princeton University; Pew Charitable Trust grant, 1997-2000; James Alexander Robertson Memorial Prize, Conference on Latin-American History, and Jane Dempsey Douglass Prize, American Society of Church History, both 1999, both for "Gender and the Politics of Mestizaje: The Convent of Santa Clara in Cuzco, Peru," published in Hispanic American Historical Review; John Gilmary Shea Prize, American Catholic Historical Association, 1999, award for Outstanding Book of 1999, Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, 2000, and Hagley Book Prize, Business History Conference, 2000, all for Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru; Ruth and Phillip Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement, University of North Carolina, 2003.

WRITINGS:

Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1999.

Contributor to books, including Women and Textual Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World, edited by Marta V. Vicente and Luis R. Corteguera, Ashgate Press (Burlington, VT), 2004; Race, Religion, and Gender in the Colonization of the Americas, edited by Nora E. Jaffary, Ashgate Press; and The Promise of the Witness in Latin America, edited by Christopher E. Garces and Michelle A. Cohen. Contributor to academic journals, including Hispanic American Historical Review and Histórica.

SIDELIGHTS: Kathryn Burns offers a history of religious women of colonial and nineteenth-century Cuzco, Peru, in Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru. Burns was denied access to the archives of Santa Clara and Santa Catalina, two of the convents she studies in the book. This led her instead to search out civil, church, and notary records that reveal the central role the women of the convents played among their families and friends and even within the colonial and republican Peruvian state itself. Burns notes that Conquistador fathers founded Santa Clara as a safe place to keep their mestiza daughters. There the women learned the Spanish ways rather than the traditions of their maternal Inca culture, thereby reinforcing the colonial society that continued with their marriages to well-connected Spanish husbands. The convent became wealthy from the donations made by these fathers, some of whose daughters chose to remain rather than marry, and from monies brought in by the nuns from outside alliances. The convents used these dowries to invest in loans and liens (censos) that provided income. They bought rural properties and rented them or used indigenous labor to work them.

The women of Santa Clara became matriarchs in their own right, often overseeing large families, including children, to serve them. They provided social services, helping women in need and abandoned children. Santa Catalina, founded in Arequipa, was forced to move to Cuzco following natural disasters in 1605, but it was years before the Dominican nuns were able to establish themselves within the community and secure their place. The third institution studied by Burns is Santa Teresa, a small Carmelite convent.

In the eighteenth century, Cuzco landowners began having difficulty making their payments, and the nuns and their representatives went to court to try to collect. The economy was further disrupted with the rebellion of 1780 to 1782, and in the 1790s and early 1800s the crown extracted funds to cover war-related deficits. The government seized convent-owned lands, established schools for girls, and allowed nuns to renounce their vows and leave the convents. It forgave landowners their censos in 1865, and the nuns had to rely on the government for funding. The nuns who up until this point had lived very well were now forced to endure the poverty they had claimed all along was their lot.

Ellen Gunnarsdottir wrote in the Journal of Latin American Studies that Burns "takes care to portray the Andean characteristics of her case by tackling the involvement of the convents with indigenous elites, both as credit institutions, but also as enforcers of the hierarchy that subjugated Andean elites to the Spanish by admitting Indian noblewomen only in the capacity of white veiled nuns or lay members. Indeed, one of the great merits of her work is her constant attention to the particularities of the uneasy cohabitation between Andeans and the Spanish."

"The outstanding merit of Burns's work is that it brings colonial religious women out of seclusion and places them at the forefront of history," commented Jeffrey L. Klaiber in Church History. "As the author demonstrates, the convents formed an integral part of society, giving rise to a peculiar spiritual and economic symbiosis. It is frequently said that to understand colonial religious life one must understand colonial society. But Colonial Habits suggests that the reverse is equally true—to understand colonial society one must enter the inner world of its convents and monasteries."