From the vantage point of colonial New Spain, my work engages both with cultural encounters on a local scale and questions of political, religious, and cultural change on a global scale. My four main areas of interest are in the history of colonial Latin America, early modern global Catholicism, Ibero-American art history, and the connected histories of the global early modern Iberian empires.
Within these geographic areas, my core thematic areas of interest include connected histories of cultural encounter, religious conversion, and knowledge production. My interests have also grown to include studies of the Spanish Pacific, natural disasters (earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and typhoons) in indigenous cosmologies and colonial knowledge-making in Latin America, and visual and material histories of Catholicism (including paintings, relics, and sculpture) between Asia, colonial Mexico, and Iberia. You can view a sample of my projects, both past and present, in the image carousel below.
Investigating the representation of sacred places in the maps and texts of the relaciones geográficas of New Spain between 1579 and 1586
