2019–20 Marilynn Thoma pre-doctoral fellow Verónica Muñoz-Nájar Luque, a PhD candidate at University of California, Berkeley, will receive $45,000 to conduct research on the unexamined imagery of the Amazon communities, collectively referred to as “Chunchos,” that inhabited Peru’s tropical lowlands during the viceregal era. Muñoz-Nájar Luque’s research will take her to several sites in Bolivia and Peru, as well as to Spain and Italy, where many of the Spanish Empire’s archives are housed. “My project seeks to rethink the representation of marginal Amazonian communities beyond the traditional Eurocentric and nationalistic colonial frameworks. The Thoma Fellowship will allow me to highlight the role that the tropical lowlands played in the colonial imagination as the ultimate exotic frontier for both European and Andean populations,” states Muñoz-Nájar Luque.
| 2019 – 2020 | |
| Art of the Spanish Americas |