Antonine Tibesar


Antonine Tibesar, O.F.M. was a Franciscan friar, a scholar of the Catholic Church in Latin America, and director of the Academy of American Franciscan History. He edited four volumes of the writings Junípero Serra, founder of the Franciscan missions in late eighteenth-century Alta California, canonized in 2015. Tibesar served as editor of the peer reviewed scholarly journal, The Americas.

Career

Tibesar was the son of an immigrant to the United States from Luxembourg, and became a Franciscan in 1927 at age 18. He was ordained as a priest seven years later. At the direction of the Franciscan province, he initially earned a Master’s in medieval European history at Catholic University of America in 1937, later returning there and earning a doctorate in Latin American history. His scholarly work first centered on the Franciscan presence in Peru. Doing archival work there, he became interested in the indigenous peoples of the Andes.
After earning his doctorate in 1950, he taught history at Catholic University, as well as serving as the director of the Academy of American Franciscan History, 1954–63 and 1970-82. He was editor of the scholarly journal ‘’The Americas’’, the second leading journal of Latin American history in the United States. The Library of Congress recorded an interview with Tibesar.
Between 1970 and 1988, he edited The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History and was responsible for making it a leading journal of Latin American history in the United States. The Conference on Latin American History, the professional organization of Latin American historians in the U.S., which is affiliated with the American Historical Association, awards an annual prize named for Tibesar for the best article published in the journal in the previous year.

Scholarly works