An award-winning author and assistant professor of history at Princeton University will visit Kalamazoo College this week to deliver the annual Edward Moritz Lecture presented by the Department of History. 

Corinna Zeltsman will discuss her book Ink under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico in a public event at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, November 7, in Dewing Hall, Room 103. A livestream will also be available. 

As a trained letterpress printer, she researches the history of printing books, political culture and labor in Latin America. She is currently working on a project that mixes the material, political and environmental history of paper in postcolonial Mexico. 

Zeltsman’s book, which received the Howard F. Cline Book Prize in Mexican History from the Latin American Studies Association, addresses individuals and factions who embraced the printing press as a key weapon in the broad struggle for political power during Mexico’s independence era. It takes readers into printing shops, government offices, courtrooms and the streets of Mexico City to reconstruct the negotiations and contests that surrounded print through a century of political transformation, from the late colonial era to the Mexican Revolution. 

The history department’s annual Edward Moritz Lecture honors the late professor Edward Moritz, who taught British and European history at K from 1955–88 and served for many years as the department chair. For more information on this event, contact Abigail Davenport-Walker at Abigail.Davenport-Walker@kzoo.edu.