My name is Natalie Cobo and I am a legal and intellectual historian of the early modern Iberian World. I approach this work in three ways: historical research into the early modern Iberian world, Neo-Latin translation, and digital humanities.

My current monograph, Paper Archipelago: The Spanish invasion and colonization of the sixteenth century Philippines examines how Spanish settlers, officials, and missionaries established a colonial administration and the practical consequences of this for Indigenous peoples. It explores how the Spanish conquest was effected; the contingent and circumstantial development of local colonial policies and institutions within the broader normative framework of Spanish imperialism and early modern European legal culture; and the ways in which Indigenous communities interacted with and shaped colonial impositions.

I am a translator of Neo-Latin and my current project, based at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt, aims to produce a translation and critical edition of the key work of seventeenth-century Spanish administrative jurisprudence, de Gubernatione, by Juan de Solórzano y Pereira, from Latin into English and Spanish.

I am a co-founder of the Colombian registered non-profit foundation Neogranadina, which has become a leader in the field of digital humanities in Latin America over the last decade. The core of our work is the design and production of low-cost archival document scanners, which we donate to archives in the Global South to digitize their collections, and work with them to make the resulting images freely available.

For more information, please follow the links in the menu bar to the left or contact me.