Santa Arias (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) is Professor and Head of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her teaching and research foreground the critical importance of space, place, and nature in cultural products produced under colonialism, and she deploys a transoceanic perspective to study early modern Iberian colonial-imperial engagements from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, with a focus on historiography, geographical discourses, and visual culture. Her published work includes the monograph Retórica, historia y polémica: Bartolomé de las Casas y la tradición intelectual renacentista (2001) and five co-edited volumes, among them Mapping Colonial Spanish America (2002), The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives(2008), Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early Iberian World (2013), and The Routledge Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492–1898) (2020). Her current book project, Entanglements at the Colonial/Imperial Archive: Íñigo Abbad y Lasierra's Iberian Global Frontiers, recovers the full scope of one of the most wide-ranging yet underexamined intellectual figures of late Spanish colonialism.