Rate My Professor Shawn Austin

Shawn M. Austin is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. Specializing in colonial Latin America, ethnohistory, and gender, he teaches courses on colonial and modern Latin American history. Austin holds a B.A. in history with a minor in Spanish from Brigham Young University-Idaho, an M.A., and a Ph.D. with distinction in Latin American history from the University of New Mexico. He joined the University of Arkansas in 2015 as an assistant professor after teaching at Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana. As affiliate faculty in the Indigenous Studies Program, Latin American and Latino Studies Program, International and Global Studies Program, and Honors Humanities Project, he contributes to interdisciplinary initiatives.

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.