Carlos Eire

Carlos Eire is a historian of late medieval and early modern Europe at Yale University who focuses on the Protestant and Catholic Reformations; the history of popular piety; the history of the supernatural, and the history of death. At Yale he has served as chair of the Religious Studies Department and the Renaissance Studies Program. 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 (1986); From Madrid to Purgatory(1995); A Very Brief History of Eternity (2010); Reformations: The Early Modern World (2016); The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila: A Biography (2019), and They Flew: A History of the Impossible (2023). He is also co-author of Jews, Christians, Muslims: An Introduction to Monotheistic Religions (1997). In 2003 he won the National Book Award in Nonfiction for his first memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003), which has been translated into more than a dozen languages. His second memoir, Learning to Die in Miami (2010), explores his early years in exile. His book Reformations won the R.R.Hawkins Prize for Best Book of the Year from the American Publishers Association, as well as the award for Best Book in the Humanities. It was also awarded the Jaroslav Pelikan Prize by Yale University Press. All of his books are banned in Cuba, where he has been proclaimed an enemy of the state – a distinction he regards as the highest of all honors.