Carlos M. N. Eire is the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. He is a historian of late medieval and early modern Europe. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1996, he taught at St. John’s University in Minnesota and the University of Virginia, and spent two years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author of War Against the Idols (Cambridge, 1986), From Madrid to Purgatory (Cambridge, 1995), A Very Brief History of Eternity (forthcoming, Princeton, 2009), and Reformations: Early Modern Europe 1450-1700 (forthcoming, Yale, 2010). He is also co-author of Jews, Christians, Muslims: An Introduction to Monotheistic Religions (Prentice Hall, 1997). His memoir of the Cuban Revolution, Waiting for Snow in Havana (Free Press, 2003), which won the National Book Award in nonfiction for 2003, has been translated into many languages, but is banned in Cuba. A second memoir, "Learning to Die in Miami," will be published in November 2010. It focuses on the early years of his exile in the United States.Carlos Eire was born in Havana, Cuba, on 23 November 1950. At the age of eleven he fled to the United States without his parents, as one of 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban children airlifted by Operation Peter Pan.