Carlos Eire

Carlos Eire

Carlos Eire (Carlos Manuel Nieto Eire) was born on November 23rd, 1950 and is currently 75 years old. Carlos Eire was born in Havana, Cuba. Eire attended Loyola University Chicago where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in History and Theology and Yale University where he received a PhD.

Carlos Eire is the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. He’s a historian of late medieval and early modern Europe.

Carlos got his Bachelor of Arts in History and Theology in 1973 from Loyola University, Chicago. He got his doctoral degree in 1979 from Yale University.

Before he joined the Yale faculty in 1996, he taught at St. John’s University in Minnesota and at the University of Virginia. He also spent two years at the Institute for Advance Study in Princeton.

Carlos was born November 23, 1950. His dad was a prominent judge before Castro’s revolution.

When he was 11, he and his brother Tony fled to America in 1962, becoming another statistic of the 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban kids airlifted by Operation Peter Pan. His mom eventually joined them just a few years later, but his dad never did.

For Reformations: Early Modern Europe 1450-1700, he received the R.R. Hawkins Awards for best book and the American Publishers Awards for Professional & Scholarly Excellence of 2017. Waiting for Snow in Havana, his memoir of the Cuban Revolution, won the US National Book Award for Nonfiction and was translated into many languages.

They Flew: A History of the Impossible was shortlisted for the International Society for Science and Religion Book Prize.

Accounts of apparently impossible phenomena abounded during the early modern era; stories of bilocation, levitation, and witchcraft, even while atheism, skepticism, and empirical science were beginning to supplant religious belief in the paranormal. In this book, Carlos explores how a culture increasingly devoted to scientific thinking grappled with events deemed impossible by leading intellectuals.

Carlos observes how flying witches and levitating saints were just as essential a component of early modern life as the religious turmoil of the age, and just as much a part of history as Newton’s scientific discoveries. Relying upon this array of firsthand accounts, and focusing on exceptionally impossible cases that involved demonic possession, bilocation, witchcraft, and levitation, Carlos challenges the established assumption about the redrawing of boundaries between the supernatural and natural which marked the transition to modernity.

He challenges readers to imagine a world that was animated by a totally different comprehension of reality and of the supernatural’s relationship with the natural world. The questions that he explores, like how and why “impossibility” is determined by cultural contexts, and whether there is more to reality than meets the eye or can be observed by science have lessons and resonance for our time.

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5. Jodi Picoult, author of: My Sister's Keeper.

Carlos Eire: F.A.Q