My dissertation reappraises scientific projects developed by colonial actors across the Spanish Empire during the 18th century to evaluate how such productions both engaged with and transformed the visual archive of Enlightenment science. Each chapter centers on an episode of visual scientific culture in which imperial initiatives radiated outward into colonial spaces, generating unexpected epistemic images and objects with a distinct local rhetoric. Unlike state-sponsored efforts, which produced centralized documentation and rich visual archives, the scientific endeavors I study were often undertaken in isolation and across vast distances. As a result, they have frequently been overlooked or treated as separate cases. Embracing the unevenness of what is, in fact, a large if dispersed corpus reveals a coherence of ambition that connected far-flung projects, rather than a fractured landscape of discrete thought.

I trace these developments across three domains of intellectual inquiry: the earth, the ocean, and the heavens, which corresponded to the proto-scientific fields of geology, natural history, and astronomy. My study thus moves between the viceroyalties of New Spain (Mexico City), Peru (Huancavelica), and the contact zone of the Caribbean (Havana). There, colonial entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and administrators engaged the expertise of local draftsmen, painters, printmakers, and wood-carvers to develop and communicate their observations in the service of public utility and imperial ambition, highlighting their uniquely situated knowledge.

During the first year of my fellowship, I conducted extensive fieldwork in national and regional archives, libraries, and museums across three continents: in Bolivia, Cuba, France, Mexico, Peru, Spain, and the US. I examined, firsthand, objects and related textual materials critical to my research. I also had the immense privilege of meeting professionals in the field who have since become key interlocutors and colleagues. These experiences prepared me to write and revise my dissertation manuscript during my year in residence at the Center.

Once in Washington, DC, I spent most of the fall and winter terms working on my dissertation’s second chapter, which examines Mexico City’s participation in the global observation of the transit of Venus in 1769. This rare astronomical event captured the attention of illustrious thinkers worldwide since it was expected to enable the first mapping of the solar system with accurate scale. In this chapter, I examine how polymath José Antonio Alzate (1737−1799) leveraged the global scope of the observation, establishing communication with the Académie des sciences in Paris via prints that engaged the visual language of Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie. I contrast his outward-looking approach with that of Felipe Zúñiga y Ontiveros (1717−1793), who capitalized on the event to legitimize his own branch of astrology, which was embedded within a religious discourse of localized heavenly providence. In October, I presented preliminary results from this research at the 2024 Scientiae Conference held at Brown University, where thoughtful insights from the audience deeply informed the chapter’s current structure and frameworks.

In the spring, I turned my attention to a case study that concludes the narrative arc of my dissertation. This chapter focuses on visualizations of geology and metallurgy produced in the mercury mines of Huancavelica, which were critical to the silver industry of Potosí. This was the topic of my shoptalk, in which I foregrounded the figure of Governor Pedro de Tagle y Bracho (1722–1802), a creole minister of law and member of a prominent Lima family, who in 1790 launched an ambitious cartographic campaign to position himself as both diagnostician and savior of the region’s faltering industry. As I discussed during my talk, Tagle’s maps functioned as a rebuttal to European science that coincided with the imminent arrival of Central and Northern European mineralogists sent by the Spanish Crown. By adopting an aesthetic of anticipation, he crafted maps based on insights that only those already on the ground could have articulated—that is, the region’s long history of mineral prospecting, knowledge of the mechanics of the local amalgamation industry, an awareness of the ongoing spiritual conquest of sacred Indigenous landscapes, and the deployment of silver as a symbol of territorial identity. The conversations that followed my presentation at the Center were especially generative. They sharpened my analysis of the political performance embedded in these images and helped me think more capaciously about the entanglements of aesthetics and epistemic sovereignty across the dissertation.

Johns Hopkins University
Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, 2023–2025

Having successfully defended her dissertation, Celia Rodríguez Tejuca will begin an appointment as Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University.