I am an historian of Spain, with research concentration on the Castilian court and aristocracy in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. My monograph, The Courtier and the King: Ruy Gómez de Silva, Philip II, and the Court of Spain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995; paperback reissue, 2017), surveyed the life and career of Philip II’s favorite the Prince of Eboli to illuminate the Prudent King’s manner of government, the dynamics and rivalries of his court, and the ambitions of noblemen and their possibilities for social ascent through royal favor. Subsequently I have published shorter works on subjects such as the fall (and afterlife) of the notorious seventeenth-century courtier Rodrigo Calderón, and on suicide in early modern Spain. For several years I have been at work on a book-length study tentatively entitled ‘An Apostle and a Roman’: Aristocracy, Counter-Reformation Piety, and the Cult of Honor in Habsburg Spain, which traces the shifting noble ethos of the period and argues that the characteristic conservative mentality of secular and clerical elites in later periods of Spanish history was largely a legacy of noble self-fashioning in the early modern centuries. My duties at Tulane extend also to regular teaching of medieval and modern Spanish history; I have directed three PhDs and co-directed two others, and have served on examination and dissertation committees of many colonial Latin Americanists as well as Europeanists. Outside of my principal research field, I have published on the Spanish military in the period of the transition to democracy, 1975-1982, and on providential interpretations of Hurricane Katrina.

Bethany Beachum graduated from the Stone Center's M.A. Program in Latin American Studies in May 2020. She earned her B.A. in International Development Studies from Calvin College in 2011 and upon graduating, moved to Managua, Nicaragua for five years where she worked with an international NGO that supports rural food security and public health organizations. While in Nicaragua, she also earned a graduate certificate in Food Security and Adaptation to Climate Change from the Universidad Centroamericana. After returning to the U.S., she worked in several nonprofit roles, including as a regional consultant for the Central America programs of a Washington D.C.-based NGO. While at the Stone Center, she focused her thesis research on studying the power dynamics in funding relationships between international donor organizations and national-level NGOs in Guatemala. Post-graduation, Bethany plans to continue working in the civil society sector in a grants management role with a local New Orleans nonprofit.

I am a cultural anthropologist with a long-term focus on the peoples, societies, and landscapes of the Amazon River region. Before joining the faculty at Tulane in 1991, I held appointments at the New York Botanical Garden and the Goeldi Museum (Brazil). My first scholarly monograph on the Amazon, Footprints of the Forest; Ka’apor Ethnobotany: The Historical Ecology of Plant Utilization by an Amazonian People (Columbia University Press, 1994) and my second one, Cultural Forests of the Amazon: A Historical Ecology of People and their Landscapes (University of Alabama Press, 2013), received the Mary W. Klinger Book Award from the Society for Economic Botany. The late Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands appointed me Officer of the Order of the Golden Ark (a Dutch conservation merit order) in 1993. I have worked to help establish historical ecology as a research program. I have had an interdisciplinary outlook, in fact, since the beginning of my career. My postdoctoral field research has been supported by extramural grants, including from Fulbright, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Edward John Noble Foundation, World Wildlife Fund, Environmental Defense Fund, and National Geographic Society. I was honored to receive in 2016 the President’s Award for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Teaching. I have given guest lectures at numerous scholarly venues in the United States and around the world, including Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, India, Malaysia, Vietnam, Japan, Ireland, England, Sweden, Spain, France, and Germany. My research has been mostly noted in the fields of archaeology, ecology, and ethnobiology. Recently I have done fieldwork with indigenous groups and forest peasants exhibiting traditional lifestyles in tropical forests of Malaysia, Ecuador, and Brazil, and I have studied their historical and contemporary engagements with the flora and fauna of their landscapes. My most recent research as of 2019 specifically concerns the Waorani of the Ecuadorian Amazon, where with colleagues from IKIAM (the Ecuadorian university in Tena, Ecuador) and ASU and support as P.I. from a National Geographic Society grant, I have been engaged in studying and describing an anthropogenic forest managed by forebears of the current Wao people. In 2019 I became a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow. I am using the research time freed up by that fellowship to work on a new book concerning the Lower Amazon.

My teaching emphasizes the specific areas where I do research, topically and geographically.

I teach courses in historical ecology of Amazonia, South American ethnology, environmental anthropology, ethnographic methods, and cultural anthropology. As to this last course, my textbook Inside Cultures (2016), which is an introduction to cultural anthropology, is in its second edition with Routledge. My graduate advising and mentoring are in related areas of these specialty interests. I have thus far supervised ten dissertations at Tulane, with five more in the pipeline. I also advise undergraduate majors in anthropology and occasionally environmental studies.

In terms of department and university service, I served as chair of anthropology for a three-year term (1998-2001) and first director in SLA of the new Environmental Studies Program and its associated major (2007-2010). I have served on many dissertation, MA, and undergraduate honors committees, department committees, and college and university committees, including a term in the university Senate.

In terms of professional service, I was editor of the Journal of Ethnobiology (1998-2001) and President-elect (2011-13) and President (2013-15) of the Society of Ethnobiology. I am one of the founders of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America (SALSA) and its associated journal, Tipiti, its first Secretary-Treasurer, and second President (2002-2005). I am also lifetime member of that society. I am currently coeditor of the New Frontiers in Historical Ecology series at Routledge and serve on the editorial boards of Human Ecology, Boletim do Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi (Ciencias Humanas), and Révue d’Ethnoécologie.

Melissa Bailes is an associate professor of English specializing in British literature of the long eighteenth century (1660-1830), transatlantic and transnational studies, and the history of science.  She has written articles and book chapters focusing on the Caribbean as well as Latin and South America.  She especially works on ideas about gender and colonialism as they relate to literature and the environment.  Her first book, Questioning Nature: British Women’s Scientific Writing and Literary Originality, 1750-1830 (U Virginia P), won the 2017 Book Prize from the British Society for Literature and Science.  Her second book, Regenerating Romanticism: Botany, Sensibility, and Originality in British Literature, 1750-1830, was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2023.  Bailes's research has been supported by long-term fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the American Association of University Women, and the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA.