We are very pleased to have Professor Bianca Premo (Florida International University) join us as our first guest blogger of the new decade. She is a historian of Latin America and the author of two scholarly monographs. The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a comparative study of how ordinary, often illiterate litigants made law modern in the courtrooms of vast regions of the eighteenth-century Spanish empire. Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (UNC Press, 2005) reveals how Lima's children were socialized into colonial hierarchies and how adults viewed and practiced their roles as authority figures over children in a legal culture that favored elite fathers and distant kings. Prof. Premo has also co-edited Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America (University of New Mexico Press, 2007), a collection on children and childhood in early modern Spain, Portugal, and colonial Latin America. She is the author of over a dozen articles and book chapters on colonial Peru and Mexico and early modern Spain, spanning the fields of legal studies, ethnohistory, gender, family history, and Atlantic history. Her next research projects will take her deeper into the history of childhood and gender--and into the twentieth century. You can read more about Prof. Premo's work and interests here.Welcome, Bianca Premo!
--Mitra Sharafi
