I am a historian of colonial Latin America, a scholar and practitioner of digital humanities, and a public historian. My work is rooted in the history of the Indigenous peoples of modern-day Colombia, known as the New Kingdom of Granada during the Spanish colonial period. At UCSB I direct the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program and the Center for Latin American and Iberian Research (CLAIR).

My work on colonial Latin America takes advantage of the New Kingdom of Granada’s distinctive perspective to explore key questions in early modern history. One focus of this work has been the history of ideas and practices of race and difference, particularly surrounding Indigenous peoples and their descendants under Spanish rule. Another has been the history of early modern Ibero-American law (with a focus on ecclesiastical or “canon” law), exploring how legal regimes were produced, contested, negotiated, and translated by Europeans, Indigenous peoples, and their descendants. The third has been the history of Indigenous religious, political, and cultural change under colonialism, exploring the transformations undergone by Indigenous peoples of the Northern Andes as a result of the Spanish invasion of their lands in the early 16th century and subsequent efforts to transform them into tribute-paying Catholic subjects of the Spanish monarchy.

My digital and public history work puts technology in the service of preservation, pedagogy, and public engagement with historical materials and memory — by building digital archives and tools, and by working with communities, students, and volunteers to catalogue, describe, and activate materials held in under-resourced archives across Colombia and Peru. For this I design and build custom scanning hardware and software, platforms for the storage, description, and publication of digitised materials, and systems to share and tell stories with the results. Much of this work takes place through the Archives, Memory, and Preservation Lab (AMPL), my research and teaching laboratory at CLAIR, and the Colombian non-profit Neogranadina, which I co-founded and which maintains one of the largest post-custodial archives in Latin America.

In Latin American history, I am interested in questions concerning religious conversion and colonialism, law and normativity, languages and translation, and race and identity in the colonial period.

My work in digital and public history focuses on questions of cultural heritage preservation, minimal computing, and what it means to build digital archives with and for the communities whose history they document.

I welcome prospective graduate students interested in working across any of these areas.

In colonial Latin American history, I recently completed Uprooting and Planting, a critical edition and English translation of a key colonial legal-catechetical text, the 1576 “Catechism, Rules, and Documents for the Priests of Indians” of Archbishop Luis Zapata de Cárdenas. I am now at work on a new book on El Dorado, tracing the legend’s successive reinscriptions — from Muisca ritual practice, to colonial geographical fantasy, to nationalist symbol, to global commodity — as a study in the colonial and nationalist appropriation of the Indigenous past. I am also co-editing, with Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez and Natalie Cobo, Reading Sources for Colonial Spanish American History: A Guide, a collected volume under contract with Routledge in their Guides to Using Historical Sources series.

In digital humanities, I am developing a suite of open-source tools at AMPL and Neogranadina: a low-cost digitisation toolkit for under-resourced archives, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities; Telar, a framework for interactive visual narratives developed in collaboration with UT Austin’s Archives, Mapping, and Preservation Lab; Zasqua, a minimal-computing platform for archival publication and discovery; and Fisqua, a cataloguing platform for archives of any size, with a focus on community participation.

In public history, I am working with graduate and undergraduate students and community partners on several projects at AMPL: Collaborative Cataloguing, which trains students to read, catalogue, and edit colonial manuscripts; Activating Archives, a Burdick Global Scholars project developing egalitarian approaches to archival preservation with partners in Medellín, Colombia; The People of the Sondondo Valley, a digital archive for an Andean community in southern Peru, with Gabriela Ramos (Cambridge), José Carlos de la Puente (Texas State), and Jairo Melo (UCSB Library); and a Modern Endangered Archives Program planning grant to inventory and preserve the archive of Komuni, a Medellín-based activist collective documenting twentieth-century social-justice movements.

Books:

La venida del Reino: los muiscas, la reforma católica y el colonialismo español en el Nuevo Reino de Granada (Bogotá: Universidad del Rosario, 2026)
The Coming of the Kingdom: the Muisca, Catholic Reform, and Spanish Colonialism in the New Kingdom of Granada (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024) [Open access digital edition available here]
Co-edited with Natalie Cobo, La legislación de la arquidiócesis de Santafé en el periodo colonial [The legislation of the archdiocese of Santafé in the colonial period] (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, 2018). [Open access digital edition available here]
Mestizos Heraldos de Dios: la ordenación de sacerdotes descendientes de españoles e indígenas en el Nuevo Reino de Granada y la racialización de la diferencia, c.1573-1590 [Mestizo Heralds of God: the ordination of priests of Spanish and indigenous descent and the racialization of difference] (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, 2012). [Open access digital edition available here]

Courses taught:

I will teach HIST 8A and LAIS 10 in 2026-2027. I teach the other courses listed below regularly.

Undergraduate courses

  • HIST8A: Latin American History: pre-Columbian and Colonial Periods
  • LAIS10: Introduction to Latin American Studies
  • HIST9: Historical Investigations: Methods and Skills. Law and History in colonial Latin America.
  • HIST150CL: Colonialism and Language
  • HIST151R:  Undergraduate Research Seminar in Latin American History
  • HIST156A: History of Mexico: pre-Hispanic and colonial periods

Graduate courses

  • HIST207A-B: Research Seminar in Digital History
  • HIST250A: Foundations of Latin American History: colonial period
  • HIST253A-B: Research Seminar in colonial Latin American History