Erin Stone, Ph.D.

Dr. Erin Stone, department chair and associate professor of Latin American history and director of Early American Studies Master’s Program, teaches Latin American and Indigenous history.

A summer trip to Lima and Cuzco, Peru, gave Stone the window of opportunity to explore indigenous architecture and artifacts, but most importantly, the experience inspired her to pursue graduate studies in Latin American history.

Her article, “Mission Impossible: Slave Raiders vs. Friars in Tierra Firme 1513-1522,” which focuses on the impact of the growing Indigenous slave trade on the first religious missions along the coast of northern South America, will soon be published in The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History. She has also contributed scholarly essays to Ethnohistory and the Encyclopedia of Latin America.

In addition to her academic writing, she has given presentations at national and international conferences, including “An Indigenous Diaspora?: Exploring the Viability of a Sixteenth Century Circum-Caribbean Indigenous Diaspora” for the Conference of Ethnohistory in Las Vegas, “Granjerias de Indios: The Climax of the Indigenous Slave trade in the Americas” for the Latin American Studies Association in Washington, D.C., and “The Search for Indigenous Slaves in the Circum-Caribbean: The Key to New World Exploration and Conquest” at the Association of Caribbean Historians in San Ignacio, Belize.

In 2014, she was selected as the Huntington-Clark Summer Institute Seminar Fellow in Early American Studies. The highly competitive fellowship, which focused on “The Global Early Modern Caribbean,” allows participants to engage with other scholars and conduct their own research using Huntington Library’s collections. In 2011, she was also awarded the Institute of International Education, formerly the Fulbright Hayes Graduate Fellowship, for International Study in Spain and the Dominican Republic. 

Stone received bachelor’s degrees in International Studies and Spanish from the University of Miami, a master’s degree in history from the University of North Florida and a doctorate in history, with a focus on Atlantic World history, from Vanderbilt University.