Rate My Professor Shawn Austin

Austin's research examines interethnic kinship networks and cultural interactions among Guaraní Indigenous peoples, Spaniards, and Africans in colonial Paraguay and the Río de la Plata region. His monograph, Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay (University of New Mexico Press, 2020), analyzes how Guaraní social structures influenced colonial society through marriage, encomienda systems, and Jesuit missions. The book earned the 2021 Bandelier/Lavrin Book Prize in Colonial American History from the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies and an Honorable Mention for the 2022 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Award from the American Society for Ethnohistory. He received a 2024 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend to support research on his current project, Guaraní Militias and the Politics of Defense in the Spanish Río de la Plata, 16th-19th Centuries, involving archival work on Jesuit letters in Rome. Austin also engages in Guaraní and Spanish translation projects and delivers public lectures on Indigenous mission militias.