Daniel Reff

Daniel Reff is an anthropologist and ethnohistorian of colonial Latin America with a particular interest in European and Indian relations and Spanish missionary texts.

His first book, Disease, Depopulation, and Culture in Northwestern New Spain, 1518-1764 (University of Utah Press, 1991), explores the dynamics of Jesuit and Indian relations in what is today northern and the American southwest. He is co-author of a critical edition of Andrés de Ribas, History of the Triumphs of Our Holy Faith (1645) (University of Arizona Press, 1999).

Professor Reff is completing a comparative study of missionary texts from early medieval Europe and colonial Latin America . He is also currently preparing a critical, English-language edition of a manuscript in Portuguese from 1585 in which the author, Luis Fois, S.J., wrote at length about the differences in European and Japanese cultures.