Bio
Professor Premo is a historian of Latin America, with specializations in legal history, the history of childhood, and a range of ancillary fields. Her prize-winning books include The Enlightenment on Trial (Oxford, 2017; Spanish version Ilustración a juicio, Tirant lo Blanch 2026), which reveals how ordinary, often unlettered litigants made law modern in the courtrooms of various regions of the 18th-century Spanish empire. Her first book, Children of the Father King (UNC, 2005), explores how children in Lima, Peru were socialized into colonial hierarchies and how adults viewed and practiced their roles as authority figures over them in a legal culture that favored elite fathers and distant kings. She also co-edited Raising an Empire (New Mexico, 2007) a volume of historical scholarship about children and childhood in early modern Iberia and colonial Latin America. She has authored over a dozen articles and multiple book chapters on the histories of Peru, Mexico, and early modern Spain, in areas such as the history of age, Indigenous history, disability studies, and the history of enslavement. Her current research encompasses the history of childhood— particularly girlhood— in the 20th and 21st centuries, and has been supported by fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Professor Premo loves introducing non-majors to Latin America’s rich past in lower-division courses. Her specialized and graduate courses focus on themes such as legal history, childhood and youth, and the history of women in the region. At the graduate level, one of her favorite courses is a seminar about conceptualizing and teaching Latin American History in the US.