Professor Camilla Townsend FBA

Summary

Camilla Townsend was born in New York City and is a Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, in the United States.

Her wide-ranging research engages with Indigenous history throughout the colonial Americas, but her primary focus is on Nahuatl (or Aztec)-language sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts written by Nahuas, for Nahuas, without regard to the interests of Europeans.

Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Commission, the American Association of University Women, the American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and most recently, the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress.

Her books have earned numerous prizes. Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs won the Cundill Prize for History in 2020.

Select Publications [these are all sole-authored]

The Aztec Myths

(Thames & Hudson, 2024)

Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

(Oxford, 2019)

Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive

(Oxford, 2017)

Here in This Year: Seventeenth-Century Nahuatl Annals of the Tlaxcala-Puebla Valley

(Stanford University Press, 2010)

Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico

(University of New Mexico Press, 2006)

Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma

(Hill & Wang, 2004)