Valeria López Fadul is an Associate Professor of History and Latin American Studies and an Associate Editor of History & Theory. She studies the intellectual and cultural history of colonial Latin America and early modern Spain, with a focus on the philosophy of language and the history of science

López Fadul researches the way knowledge was made and circulated in early Latin America and across the Iberian world. She teaches courses on the history of colonial and modern Latin America, science in the early modern Atlantic, urban and environmental history, and the Amazon.

López Fadul’s book, The Cradle of Words: Language and Knowledge in the Spanish Empire (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025) reconstructs the beliefs and practices with which sixteenth-century humanists, missionaries, and crown officials governed Spanish America’s multilingual domains. It shows that while the multiplicity of languages made governing difficult, these scholars also perceived it as a resource. To those charged with extracting knowledge from Spain’s rapidly expanding empire, language was an archive of local knowledge. In order to access and catalogue it, the Spanish Crown sponsored scientific expeditions, comprehensive censuses, the writing of local and universal histories, and the creation of libraries. The Cradle of Wordsreveals how these ambitious projects sought collectively to master the human and natural history of the Indies.

López Fadul received a B.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. In 2020-21, she was a Member in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ). She has received fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, and the John Carter Brown Library. Before coming to Wesleyan, López Fadul was a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago and a scholar in residence at the Newberry Library.