Carlos Eire

T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies, Yale University

Carlos Eire was born in Havana in 1950 and came to the U.S. in 1962 without his parents, as one of the 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban refugee children ferried to Miami by the Pedro Pan airlift. After living in various foster homes for three and a half years, he reunited with his mother in Chicago, where he worked full-time jobs while attending high school and college. His father was never allowed to leave the island and died without ever seeing his family again.
He is now the T. L. Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University, and he specializes in the social, intellectual, religious, and cultural history of late medieval and early modern Europe, with a focus on both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations; the history of popular piety; and the history of the supernatural, and the history of death.
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.
His most recent book is They Flew: A History of the Impossible (2023). His other books include War Against the Idols (1986); From Madrid to Purgatory (1995); A Very Brief History of Eternity (2010); Reformations (2016); The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila (2019); and he is also co-author of Jews, Christians, Muslims (1997).
Two decades ago, he ventured into the twentieth century and the Cuban Revolution in the childhood memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003), which won the National Book Award in Nonfiction in the United States and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. In a second memoir, Learning to Die in Miami (2010), he explores the exile experience.
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 and articles are banned in Cuba, where he has been proclaimed an enemy of the state – a distinction he regards as the highest of all honors.