Bianca Premo, associate professor of history, Florida International University
"The Republic of the Unlettered: Intellectual History, the Enlightenment, and the Law in the Spanish Empire"

Humanities Forum
Dresher Center for the Humanities

Wednesday, October 21 | 4 pm
Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery

This talk explores what it means to write an intellectual history of the Enlightenment among people who could not read or write—namely enslaved people, women, and the indigenous inhabitants of the colonial Spanish America who sued in royal courts during the eighteenth century.

Bianca Premo is associate professor of Latin American history at Florida International University. She has written on diverse topics including the history of childhood in colonial Peru, native women in the Andes and Mexico, slavery, and jurisprudence and legal thought in the Spanish empire. Her latest book project is entitled The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigation and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire, and it is the product of research in over a dozen archives in Spain, Mexico and Peru.