Carlos Eire

Carlos Eire's picture
T Lawrason Riggs Professor of History & Religious Studies
(203) 432-1357
Curriculum Vitae: 

Fields of Interest

Europe: Early modern Europe; Intellectual, social, cultural & religious history; Protestant Reformation; Catholic Reformation (Spain, France, Germany)
 

Bio

Carlos Eire, who received his PhD from Yale in 1979, specializes in the social, intellectual, religious, and cultural history of late medieval and early modern Europe, with a strong focus on both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations; the history of popular piety; and the history of death. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1996, he taught at St. John’s University in Minnesota and the University of Virginia, and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for two years.  He is the author of War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship From Erasmus to Calvin (1986); From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth Century Spain (1995); A Very Brief History of Eternity (2010); and co-author of Jews, Christians, Muslims: An Introduction to Monotheistic Religions (1997). He has also ventured into the twentieth century and the Cuban Revolution in the memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003), which won the National Book Award in Nonfiction in the United States (2003) and has been translated into more than a dozen languages – but is banned in Cuba.  His latest memoir, Learning to Die in Miami (2010), explores the exile experience. 

A past president of the Society for Reformation Research, Carlos Eire is currently on the editorial board of the journal Church History and the publications committee of Yale University Press. He is now writing a survey history of the Reformation era and researching attitudes toward miracles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His courses range widely in subject, but tend to focus on early modern Europe, and on religious history.