Stuart B. Schwartz

George Burton Adams Professor of History

Stuart Schwartz, BA, Middlebury College; PhD, Columbia University; faculty member at Yale since 1996, after many years at the University of Minnesota: You are a distinguished historian of the Iberian world with interests in social, cultural, economic, and environmental history, and you have been called “perhaps the most outstanding scholar of Brazilian history in the world.” 

Over time your four major, award-winning monographs on law, religion, family, slave society, and economy have earned you distinction and awards. Your fifth book, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World, which traces the idea of tolerance in the Hispanic world from 1500–1820, focused on the attitudes of common people rather than elites. It swept the field of awards, winning six major prizes including the 2008 Cundill International Prize in History, the largest non-fiction historical literature prize in the world, for “a book that has had a profound literary, social and academic impact on a given subject.” 

Beyond this, your presence gave the university a spirit and place in Iberian studies it could not have had without you. You brought young and distinguished scholars from Brazil, sent Yalies to do research there and in Spain and Portugal, and led the university’s program in Iberian and Latin American Studies in one of its most creative periods.   

None of your wide and deep scholarship, your teaching, and mentoring—as the dissertation adviser of more than twenty-four students at Yale alone—or your work in a multitude of professional organizations, editorial boards, and advisory boards has prevented you from active engagement in the community life of Yale. You took the time to lead the search for the head of La Casa Cultural in 2001. 

From 2003–2008 you and your wife, Maria Jordan, a senior lector in the department of Spanish and Portuguese, whose special interest is in the literature and cultural history of early modern Spain and early modern Latin America, were Heads of College for Ezra Stiles. You nobly carried on the tradition of “The Moose” as leaders of the home-away-from-home for hundreds of Yalies, held study breaks and teas, and were a stalwart member of the Stiles softball team, leaving in 2008 to a standing ovation from students.

When your retirement was announced last year, a large celebration at Yale in your honor featured research papers, speed talks, and appreciations from your many students and admiring colleagues from around the globe. As you retire, Yale thanks you for your exemplary and pathbreaking scholarship, your teaching and mentoring, and all your contributions to the Yale community.