A University of Houston-Victoria history faculty member has received her second fellowship in the past few years and will have the opportunity to finish a research project in California.

Esther Cuenca

Esther Cuenca, a UHV assistant professor of history, recently won a fellowship from the Huntington Library and a project development grant of $5,000 from the American Council of Learned Societies to finish her monograph on body art and tattooing customs in the global Middle Ages.

“The collection at the Huntington Library is huge and will give me a look into some of the firsthand accounts of how people’s attitudes toward body art and tattoos have changed through the centuries,” Cuenca said.

Cuenca will spend the fall semester in San Marino, Calif., researching in The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, which contains a massive collection of medieval books and manuscripts. The research she conducts will allow her to complete her book manuscript that is due to the publisher in 2026.

Craig Goodman

“Dr. Cuenca is an exceptional scholar of the medieval world,” said Craig Goodman, interim associate dean for the UHV College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences. “The fellowship she earned at the Huntington Library is another well-deserved accolade and an opportunity for her to work on her next book.”

The topic for Cuenca’s research first developed a few years ago when she was on another research fellowship at Princeton. During that project, she began thinking about the modern attitude toward tattoos and body art, and she began to wonder when those attitudes began to develop.

“In my research, I have found that medieval attitudes can be like modern ones about tattooing. People can be the subjects of exoticization or criminalization because of their body art,” Cuenca said. “My research will reveal that there is a rich history when it comes to tattoos, and that medieval authorities sometimes had nuanced views about the practice of tattooing.”

Some of the materials that Cuenca plans to examine include printed books, manuscripts and journals from early European explorers, such as the Spanish and the English, who came in contact with Native American tribes and native peoples from the Pacific Island nations during colonization. As she began researching, Cuenca found some inconsistencies with current writing versus what the source materials said.

“As a medieval historian, my first thought when pursuing a topic is to see what was happening during the Middle Ages and what the people who lived during that time said,” she said. “What I found when I started researching was that much of the information previously shared about these statements from original sources was either confused or misinterpreted.”

As her research shows that people had an interest in body art during the Middle Ages, she points to art from the time, such as the drawing “A Young Daughter of the Picts” from 1585. The drawing by Jacques Le Moyne shows a portrayal of a young woman from the ancient Pict tribe in what is Scotland today. She is shown holding a spear with a sword at her hip and her body covered in tattoos of flowers. Another drawing from the same period is “Painted Ones” found in the Boxer Codex, which shows men and women of the Philippines with heavily tattooed skin.

“Fellowships and grants like these are lifelines for humanities scholars,” Cuenca said. “I hope people will understand how important both private and public funds are in allowing the humanities to thrive and helping us to better understand ourselves through these studies.”