Professor Eire specializes in the social, intellectual, religious, and cultural history of late medieval and early modern Europe, with a strong focus on both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations; the history of popular piety; and the history of death. He is the author of a number of scholarly books, includingWar Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship From Erasmus to Calvin; From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth Century Spain; and A Very Brief History of Eternity. Professor Eire has also ventured into the twentieth century and the Cuban Revolution in his memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana, which won the National Book Award in Nonfiction in the United States in 2003 and has been translated into more than a dozen languages – but is banned in Cuba. His latest memoir, Learning to Die in Miami,published in 2010, explores his boyhood exile experience. We talk with Carlos Eire about what it’s like to write two very different kinds of history.
