Susan Elizabeth Ramirez, the holder of the Penrose Chair of History and Latin American Studies, earned her BA with High Honors in Latin American Studies from the University of Illinois-Urbana in 1968; her MA in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1973; and her PhD in the same discipline from the same institution four years and hundreds of pages later. Besides many articles and chapters, she has written three major books. The first one, entitled Provincial Patriarchs: Land Tenure and the Economics of Power in Colonial Peru (University of New Mexico Press, 1986), is on the struggle between Spanish colonists and native communities over land, irrigation water, and control over native labor. Another, entitled The World Upside Down: Cross Cultural Contact and Conflict in Sixteenth Century Peru (Stanford University Press, 1996 and 1998), reconstructs native society and political economy in the first six decades of the sixteenth century. The emphasis here is on showing the continuities and changes in the native social structure, reciprocity-based economy (where money, markets, and merchants were unknown), and religious authority in light of an invasive European presence. Her third book, entitled To Feed and Be Fed: The Cosmological Bases of Authority and Identity in the Andes (which is due out in 2004 from Stanford University Press), is a new interpretation of the rise and fall of the Inca empire. It argues that the Cuzco, now known as the highland capital of the Incas, was (before colonial times) instead the title of the Inca ruler. "The Cuzco," as he was called, was considered a living man-god, descended from the Sun. It was not until the Spaniard Francisco Pizarro arrived and founded the "city" of "the Cuzco" that the title of the ruler was given geographical roots. This research underscores the native concept of empire as an imaginary construct based on personal loyalty and kinship with shifting "social frontiers." It contrasts with the European definition of empire that increasingly insisted on enclosing population loyal to a monarch who moved from city to city within permanent territorial frontiers represented by thin lines on a map.

Professor Ramirez loves to teach students about Latin America and especially about the colonial world and native societies. Most particularly, she hopes to pass on to students ways to access, understand, and appreciate the cosmology and cultures of native peoples. This requires learning paleography, techniques to read between the lines, and how to scrutinize and crosscheck data from various types of primary sources.

In her leisure, she likes to swim and work out and travel. She collects stamps and folk art (in particular the fast-disappearing hand-woven textile treasures of the Andes).