Dual honors for Professor of History Sylvia Sellers-Garcia
Boston College historian of colonial Latin America Sylvia Sellers-García is the recipient of prestigious dual fellowships in recognition of her scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. The awards were announced this spring by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, where she will be a Joy Foundation Fellow for the 2026–2027 academic year.
Sellers-García, a professor in the History Department, is interested in legal history, the history of empire, and the intersections of fiction and history. With these fellowships, she will pursue her book project—titled Flawed Bodies: Making Identity in the Age of Enlightenment—on Enlightenment identity categories. It is framed around the criminal case of Juana Aguilar, an indigenous intersex person accused of various crimes and arrested multiple times and tried by the secular authorities in El Salvador and Guatemala between 1792 and 1801.
“I am so grateful to the Radcliffe Institute and the ACLS for supporting my project, and I am grateful to BC for making it possible for me to accept both and take a year for writing time,” she said. “I feel so honored to be selected by these organizations. For me, it's very challenging to write during the academic year; this unrestricted writing time is absolutely essential to me for new writing.”
Last year, Penn State University Press published Sellers-Garcia’s introduction to and English translation of Aguilar’s case: The Criminal Case of Juana Aguilar: Adjudicating Gender in Colonial Central America. Her current project related to this “fascinating case” as she described it, which had fallen out of view for decades, “is to write a public-facing history book about Aguilar and the Enlightenment.
“While Aguilar's story is sensational, an equally sensational story about identity unfolds in the background. Medicine, law, and religion all combined to make Aguilar's identity a ‘problem.’"
This was a fairly new problem in the eighteenth-century, Sellers-García explained, and Flawed Bodies tells the story of how these institutions attempted to define Aguilar.
“Though identity categories around gender, race, occupation, marital status, and more had existed for centuries, identity categories around gender especially had become more rigid in this period, and the strict gender binary that the judge applied in the conclusion of Aguilar's case was being enforced in novel ways,” she said.
In the end, Aguilar—who underwent 11 physical examinations during incarceration—was determined by the Guatemalan court to be neither male or female and as a result, didn’t belong in society. Rather than banishment, the judge determined that Aguilar should be allowed to live among other people under surveillance, without intimate relationships.
“Drawing on archival sources and scholarly works in the history of sexuality, history of religion, history of medicine, legal history, and social history, this project contributes to understandings of how modern society, through the ‘flawed bodies’ of Enlightenment-era institutions, imposed enduring identity categories,” according to the ACLS.
“I think this story will be compelling to readers because we, in the present, unwittingly embrace many of the identity categories that were shaped and enforced in the Enlightenment period,” said Sellers-Garcia. “I hope my treatment of this case will reveal to readers where some of the categories that we take for granted really come from.”
Sylvia Sellars-Garcia
Sellers-García, who co-directs the University’s renowned Lowell Humanities Series, is one of 63 scholars selected from more than 2,000 applicants by ACLS, which was founded in 1919. “We are proud to award ACLS Fellowships to outstanding scholars across a range of fields,” said President Joy Connolly. “Deep understanding of humanity and human endeavor rests on the work of generations of scholars who need time to do research and develop their arguments. We salute the new fellows’ contributions to knowledge and to society, and we celebrate their expertise and dedication.”
The Harvard Radcliffe Institute interdisciplinary cohort of 50 fellows is drawn from contemporary scholars in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and arts—along with writers, journalists, playwrights, professionals. They will pursue ambitious projects in the unique environment of the Institute within the larger community of Harvard University and convene regularly to share their work in progress with the community and public, according to the Institute, one of the world’s leading centers for interdisciplinary exploration.
“I’m inspired by the wisdom, creativity, and passion of our incoming fellows,” said Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, in announcing fellows. “At a time when higher education has been under heightened scrutiny, our new fellowship class offers hope and purpose—a reminder of the vital importance of scholarly exploration and advanced study.”
In addition to her scholarly books, Sellers-Garcia has authored both critically acclaimed novels and a series of middle grade and young adult fiction books.
“I'm a writer with a foot in a history and a foot in fiction,” she said. “As a historian, I focus on colonial Central America and the Spanish empire, especially on the eighteenth-century. I'm interested in issues of colonialism, gender, and race. As a fiction writer, I'm drawn to the in-between places of American identity, the unreliability of memory, and questions of truth-telling.”