Cobo Betancourt, Juan

Bio:

I am a historian of colonial Latin America and a scholar and practitioner of digital humanities and digital public history. Across these areas my work is rooted in the study of the history of the indigenous peoples of the region of modern-day Colombia, known as the New Kingdom of Granada during the Spanish colonial period.

My work on colonial Latin America takes advantage of New Granada’s distinctive perspective to explore key questions in early modern history. One focus of this work has been the history of ideas and practices of race and difference, particularly surrounding indigenous peoples and their descendants under Spanish rule. Another has been the history of early modern Ibero-American law (with a focus on ecclesiastical or “canon” law), exploring how legal regimes were produced, contested, negotiated, and translated by Europeans, indigenous peoples, and their descendants. The third has been the history of indigenous religious, political, and cultural change under colonialism, exploring the transformations undergone by indigenous peoples of the Northern Andes as a result of the Spanish invasion of their lands in the early 16th century and subsequent efforts to transform them into tribute-paying Catholic subjects of the Spanish monarchy.

My digital work has focused on the preservation of historical materials through digitisation, for which I design and build custom hardware and software, and on the creation of digital archives, tools, and resources to make the use and study of these materials possible in new and different ways. As a public historian, I have also worked on multiple public-facing initiatives to bring historical materials to new audiences, through community-based cataloguing and peer-production projects in Colombia and Peru. My work in these areas has taken place through Neogranadina, a Colombian non-profit foundation I co-founded with colleagues for this purpose. With the help of UCSB graduate and undergraduate students, and volunteers around the world, we have made thousands of colonial materials from Colombian archives available online for the first time.