Biography
Isabel Farías is originally from San Cristóbal de las Casas, a small town in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, but grew up in New York City. She received her B.A. in Ancient Studies from Barnard College and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown University, where she specialized in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico.
Her research brings together classical reception studies, Classical Nahuatl, and translation studies, with a particular interest in the multilingual writing of colonial Mexico. Focusing on texts written in Nahuatl, Latin, and Spanish, she examines how linguistic differences were managed as knowledge circulated across the Atlantic and among different social and intellectual communities. She is particularly interested in the ways historical narratives took shape within this multilingual and hierarchical environment, and in how Indigenous and European forms of knowledge were translated and reorganized as they traveled between languages, communities, and institutions.