Valeria López Fadul is an Assistant Professor of History and Latin American Studies and an Assistant Editor of History & Theory. She studies the intellectual and cultural history of colonial Latin America and early modern Spain, with a focus on the philosophy of language and the history of science.

López Fadul researches how knowledge was made and circulated in early Latin America and across the Iberian world. She teaches courses on the history of colonial and modern Latin America, science in the early modern and modern Atlantic, urban and environmental history, and the Amazon.

López Fadul’s book, The Cradle of Words: Language and Knowledge in the Spanish Empire (forthcoming January 2025), reconstructs the beliefs and practices with which sixteenth-century humanists, missionaries, and crown officials governed Spanish America’s multilingual domains. It shows that while the multiplicity of languages made governing difficult, these scholars also perceived it as a resource. To those charged with extracting knowledge from Spain’s rapidly expanding empire, language was an archive of local knowledge. In order to access and catalogue it, the Spanish Crown sponsored scientific expeditions, comprehensive censuses, the writing of local and universal histories, and the creation of libraries. The Cradle of Words reveals how these ambitious projects sought to collectively master the human and natural history of the Indies.

Her current book project, Along the Caiman’s Way: The Great Magdalena River in Early Spanish America explores both the history of a river and the transformations that natural historical writing underwent in Spanish America during the first decades of the seventeenth century. The project focuses on sixteenth-and-seventeenth-century understandings of the Magdalena River (located in modern-day Colombia) and of riverine environments more broadly. It studies how early modern actors made their knowledge of the river and how they sought to transform the riparian landscape, and its people, based on this knowledge.

López Fadul received a B.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. In 2020-21, she was a Member in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ). She has received fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, and the John Carter Brown Library. Before coming to Wesleyan, López Fadul was a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago and a scholar in residence at the Newberry Library.

Publications

Book:

The Cradle of Words: Language and Knowledge in the Spanish Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming January 2025).

Peer-Reviewed Articles and Book Chapters:

“Juan Páez de Castro and the Project of a Universal Library,” in Wars of Knowledge: Imperial Hegemony and the Assembling of Libraries Forum, Pacific Coast Philology, Vol. 52, No. 2, 2017, pp. 173-183.

“Language as Archive: Etymologies and the Remote History of Spain,” in Mercedes García-Arenal (ed.), After Conversion: Iberia and the Emergence of Modernity, (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 95-125.

“Aurel Stein’s Methods and Aims in Archaeology on the Silk Road,” in Helen Wang (ed.), Sir Aurel Stein, Colleagues and Collections, British Museum Research Publication 184, London 2012, pp. 1–7.

Web-Based Publications:

“A Cacique By Any Other Name: Or Etymologies in Translation from London to the Caribbean,” in The Collation: Research and Exploration at the Folger (Folger Shakespeare Library, December 2020). 

“Language and the Ancient History of a New World,” in Contextos (Center for Latin American Studies, The University of Chicago, January 2017).