Dr. Cristian Berco Shortlisted for CHA’s Wallace K. Ferguson Prize

Dr. Cristian Berco’s latest book, From Body to Community: Venereal Disease and Society in Baroque Spain (UTP, 2016) has been shortlisted for the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize, an award given by the Canadian Historical Association for the most outstanding scholarly book in a field other than Canadian history. In his monograph, Dr. Berco traces the history of The Great Pox – a disease we now know as syphilis – in seventeenth-century Spain, relates the social stigma and physical suffering that this disease placed on its victims, and outlines the lives of patients within and beyond the walls of the medical institution that cared for them.

Dr. Berco teaches the history of medieval and early modern Europe, and colonial and modern Latin America. His research focuses on the social history of the body, mainly through work on sexuality, disease and ethnicity. His first book, Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status (2007), examined sodomy trials in the Aragonese Inquisition.