Camilla Townsend’s command of Indigenous language led to acclaimed work
Camilla Townsend, a historian whose facility with languages helped her tell the story of the Aztec people through their own words, has been elected as a fellow of the British Academy, the UK’s venerable national academy for the humanities and social sciences.
Townsend is the first Rutgers faculty member to be named to the 123-year-old academy and is one of just several American scholars from public universities among the 2025 fellows.
Camilla Townsend is the first Rutgers professor to be named to the British Academy.“I feel deeply honored,” said Townsend, a Distinguished Board of Governors Professor of History who received her PhD from Rutgers. “But more to the point, it’s an honor for Rutgers University itself.”
The academy described Townsend as a pioneering scholar whose research on the Aztec civilization in what is now Mexico broke new ground by using Indigenous sources rather than the accounts written by Europeans.
“Her wide-ranging research engages with Indigenous history throughout the colonial Americas,” the academy noted. “But her primary focus is on Nahuatl (Aztec) language texts written by Nahuas, for Nahuas, without regard to the interests of Europeans.”
Townsend’s command of the Aztec language fueled her widely acclaimed 2019 book, “Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs,” which received the 2020 Cundill History Prize.
Her research for that book focused on the writings of young Aztec men in the 1500s who had been taught the Roman alphabet by Spanish friars—the Roman Catholic clerics who accompanied Hernán Cortés in his conquest of the Aztec Empire.
The friars had intended to equip the Aztec men with the linguistic skills needed to spread Catholicism among the Indigenous people. And while widespread proselytizing and conversions did take place, the Aztec men also took some unexpected steps after the 1521 conquest to preserve their heritage.
“They took this alphabet home, and they would say to their grandparents, ‘tell me the prayer you used to pray, or the history you used to tell, or the songs you used to sing,’’’ Townsend said.
Those writings, known as annals, provided a valuable but overlooked record of Aztec life.
“For a long time, people thought it was influenced by the Spanish,” Townsend said. “But when you actually learn to read the sources, you can see that they’re saying things that Spaniards wouldn’t say.
“These are Indigenous people talking to other Indigenous people.”
Camilla Townsend's 2020 book was praised for telling the story of the Aztecs through their own writings.
Townsend, a native of New York City, originally set out to specialize in comparative colonial economic history as a doctoral student at Rutgers. But as a young faculty member at Colgate University in the 1990s, she took a summer class on the Nahuatl language that changed the course of her career.
“I had a fire lit under me when I realized the richness of the sources that were written down in the 1500s,” she said. “I thought ‘this is what I wanted to do.’
“So I changed from colonial comparative economic history to the history of the Indigenous and the colonizers.”
She returned to Rutgers in 2006, joining the faculty of the Department of History.
“I loved my years as a graduate student, and 12 years later I discovered it was a wonderful place to teach as well,” she said. “The students are so open, with such energy, commitment, and general curiosity.”
In her election to the British Academy, Townsend joins a cohort of international scholars that the academy recognizes each year in addition to the U.K. scholars. This year’s selection ranges from a Medievalist at the University of Paris–Sorbonne to an economist from Harvard University to a scholar of the Old Testament at the University Göttingen in Germany.
Townsend, though deeply proud of the honor, decided against traveling to London last month for the installation ceremonies. She had a full schedule of teaching, including a senior seminar in history and her own course, “Ancient Kingdoms: A History of the Aztecs, Incas and Mayas.”
“I’d have to miss a week’s worth of classes,” she said. “And that’s too many.”