Anna is a PhD candidate in the Department of History studying history of science. Her dissertation, “Collecting Empire: The Science and Politics of Natural History Museums in New Spain, 1770-1820,” focuses on natural history collecting in eighteenth-century Spain and Spanish America. With the support of a research grant from The Europe Center, Anna traveled to Spain this past summer to research natural history museums and collections. Her goal was to find records and remnants of natural history objects—such as fossils, dried plants, and taxidermied animals—that Spanish subjects sent from the Americas to the Iberian Peninsula. She hopes to compare the contents of these shipments with the items of science that remained in New Spain, the colonial region that stretched from California south to Guatemala. Anna began her research in Madrid at the
Royal Botanical Garden, where she read correspondence from the Viceregal Botanical Garden in Mexico City, the first state-sanctioned natural history institution in New Spain. Next, she headed to the archive at the
National Museum of Natural Sciences, where she had the opportunity to examine manifests of the first shipments of objects of natural history sent there from the Americas. While she mostly spent her time at these two institutions, Anna made short visits to smaller museums around the city as well. At the
Javier Puerta Museum of Anatomy at the Complutense University, she encouraged the director to unlock the door to the collection of impeccable anatomical waxes in between proctoring final exams.
Anna finished her trip in Seville at the
General Archive of the Indies. Here, while combing through microfiches of what were essentially 18th-century packing slips—the letters accompanying shipments of natural things that made their way through the port of Seville on their journey to the royal museum in Madrid—Anna discovered evidence of long-forgotten natural history collections in Mexico City and Guatemala City. A preliminary research trip to Guatemala City in July to follow up on these exciting leads is supported by funding from the
Center for Latin American Studies . Being in Europe also afforded Anna enriching experiences outside of the archives. She attended a week-long summer school for doctoral students researching the history of collecting at the
Lichtenberg-Kolleg at the University of Göttingen in Germany. She stopped in Paris to visit family as well as the library at the
National Museum of Natural History. Anna also enjoyed outdoor summer concerts in Madrid, the delicious fish at the freidurías on a day trip to Cádiz, and
the largely abandoned pavilions from the Expo '92 on Seville's island of La Cartuja. This year, Anna looks forward to returning to Spain thanks to the support of The Europe Center in order to continue her dissertation research. Her first stop will be the municipal archive in the small Basque town of Calahorra, the birthplace of one of the naturalists whom she studies, with the hope that she will find even more clues pointing to the development of natural history collections in New Spain.
