Paul Ramírez is Assistant Professor of History at Northwestern University. He specializes in the history of Mexico with research interests in public health and healing, social responses to epidemic disease, and varieties of religious practice and experience in the colonial and national periods.

Professor Ramírez’s first book project on epidemics and public health examines the colonial rituals and genres that facilitated Mexico’s adoption of preventive medicine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Research on this and related topics has appeared in the journals Hispanic American Historical Review, Endeavour, and The Americas. His current research examines the religious dimensions of the harvest and consumption of salt in Mexico and asks how this aspect can reorient scholarly and popular understandings of markets as they prevail in commodity histories.

Professor Ramírez’s research has been supported by institutions such as the Newberry Library, the Huntington Library (San Marino, California), the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Foundation, the University of California’s Institute for Mexico and the U.S. (UC MEXUS), and Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.