Contributors

Yota Batsaki is the Executive Director of Dumbarton Oaks at Harvard University and a scholar of Enlightenment literature, philosophy, and the cultural histories of plants. 

Thomas B. F. Cummins is the Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art at Harvard University and a leading historian of the visual cultures of the Americas. 

José Luis Falconi is Professor of Art and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut, specializing in Latin American art and the intersections of aesthetics, ethics, and social change. 

William N. Goetzmann is the Edwin J. Beinecke Professor of Finance at the Yale School of Management and an expert on investment history, market behavior, and the art market. 

David Guss is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Tufts University and a writer, folklorist, and scholar of ritual, performance, and Latin American cultural worlds. 

María José Montoya is a historian and literary scholar whose work reconstructs the multiethnic histories of the Orinoco region and who directs the “Lugar Común” history microsite for Fundación Malpensante. 

Simón Posada is a Colombian journalist and award-winning nonfiction writer known for long-form reporting on science, art, politics, and history across major Latin American media. 

James A. Robinson is a political scientist and economist at the University of Chicago whose influential work on institutions and prosperity earned him, with coauthors, the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. 

Doris Sommer is the Ira and Jewell Williams Professor at Harvard University and the founder of Cultural Agents, known for pioneering work on civic agency, public humanities, and arts-driven social development.