Event

Christopher Heaney is an Associate Professor of Modern Latin American History at the Pennsylvania State University, where he trains students in the ethnohistory of science, museums, race, and deathways in the Andes, Americas, and the World. A former journalist and facilitator for the NPR oral history project StoryCorps, he earned his B.A. in Latin American Studies from Yale University and his Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas at Austin before joining the McNeil Center for Early American Studies as its 2016-2018 Barra Postdoctoral Fellow. His first book, Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones and the Search for Machu Picchu (2010), was used by the Peruvian government and Yale alumni to help achieve the return of Machu Picchu's ancestral remains and funerary possessions to Cusco, Peru. His second book, Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology (Oxford University Press, 2023), is a history of the collection and display of Inca mummies and ancient Peruvian skulls in the Americas, spanning from the 16th century to the present. It won the Conference on Latin American History's 2024 Bolton-Johnson prize for the best English-language book on any aspect of Latin American History. 

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