Sylvia Sellers-García

Sylvia Sellers-García is a professor of history at Boston College. She is a historian of colonial Latin America, focusing on documentation, archival studies, and marginality. Her book Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire’s Periphery (Stanford University Press, 2013), considers the relationship between documents and distance in the Spanish Empire. The Woman on the Windowsill: A Tale of Mystery in Several Parts (Yale University Press, 2020), tells the story of a sensational crime that took place in Guatemala City in 1800. Sellers-García also writes fiction for adults and young readers, several of which examine the intersection of the fantastical and the historical. An enduring interest for Sellers-García is the meeting point of fiction and history, the related meeting point of academic writing and popular writing, and what we can learn from them about ways of knowing. With Allison Adair, she teaches the Enduring Question course “Truth Telling in History.”