含羞草研究室

2022: Bianca Premo

Alfred E. Golz Lecture Fund was established by Ronald A. Golz '56 in 1970 in memory of his father. This fund is used to support a lecture by an eminent historian or humanitarian to be scheduled close to the November 21 birthday of Alfred E. Golz.

The Golz Lecture for the 2021-2022 academic year will be delivered by Bianca Premo.

Doctors of History: Embodied Research and the Ethics of Writing about Latin America (17th Century to Today)


Wednesday, April 20, 2022

7:30 PM

Location: Kresge, VAC

For humanities and social science PhDs, our status as “doctors” sometimes inspires jest, derision, and defensiveness. In this talk, Bianca Premo asks whether historians are, indeed, like physicians and, if so, what it might mean to “first, do no harm.” Having published on subjects ranging from voiceless children of colonial Lima to unlettered litigants in courts through the Spanish Empire, much of her work has been about ordinary people who are long dead. But a current book project on Peru’s so-called “youngest mother in the world”--a five-year old who gave birth in 1939 and who is still, by all accounts, alive today-- has led her to reflect on the implicit differences we ascribe to studying living and dead subjects, the values that underwrite telling stories about marginalized subjects, and the future of historical expertise in the digital age.

Professor Bianco Premo, Professor of History at Florida International University is interested in a wide range of topics in Latin American history. Her most recent book, The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire is a comparative study that reveals how ordinary, often illiterate litigants made law modern in the courtrooms of vast regions of the 18th-century Spanish empire. Her first book, Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (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. She also co-edited Raising an Empire (2007) a volume of historical scholarship about children and childhood in early modern Spain, Portugal and colonial Latin America. She has authored over a dozen articles and multiple book chapters on colonial Peru and Mexico and early modern Spain in the fields of legal studies, ethnohistory, gender and family history and Atlantic history. Her next research projects involve delving deeper into the history of childhood and gender and expanding her research into the twentieth century. Less