Featured Scholar: October 2023

Dr. Sara Guengerich (Associate Professor, Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures)

What are you watching/streaming? 

I am currently watching a series titled How the Silk Road Made the World. I am interested in the cultural history of commodities. Silk, a highly sought commodity from antiquity made it to the Americas through legal and illegal commercial routes and clothing made from it appear significantly in the wills and testaments of the colonial Indigenous people I study. It is also an entertaining series to watch with family. 

What games are you playing? 

Memory games, but with actual cards. I was fortunate to catch a Book Fair on my most recent research trip in Bolivia where I bought many great books and one stand had so many creative memory games that I could not resist buying. The card version helps me rest my eyes from my computer screen while I practice attention, concentration and focus. 

What are you listening to? 

I listen to all kinds of music, but my favorite is 90s pop music, particularly Brazilian blends of samba, pop, jazz and soul. 

What are you reading? 

Pleasure reading, which for me is the newest scholarship in my field as well as classic works on colonial Latin America. I currently have my hands on Adrian Master's We the King: Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth Century Spanish World (Cambridge UP, 2023). 

What are you writing/thinking about? 

I'm currently writing an Oxford encyclopedia entry for a very broad and all-encompassing topic, “Indigenous people of the Andean region during the colonial period.” I have selected the most representative monographs devoted to this subject to complete this publication commitment, and while it is a demanding task, it is giving me the chance to re-read the foundational works on this subject.  

I am also classifying, reading, and transcribing the documentary sources (notarial records, parish records, official reports, letters and memoranda) I collected in Spain and Bolivia this past summer. These sources deal with Indigenous and mestizo individuals who found their lives directly affected by local and faraway events. Some event reached Europe, willingly or unwillingly, and their presence in the archives of the early modern times shed light on larger processes of globalization and coloniality.