Jeremy Ravi Mumford

Fellow, SCAS.
Assistant Professor of History, Brown University

Jeremy Ravi Mumford is a historian of early colonial Peru. His research addresses the ways in
which Andean people interacted with the colonial state in the half-century after the Spanish
invasion of the Inca kingdom in 1531. His publications have focused on three areas: i) forced
population resettlement, which was the subject of his first book, Vertical Empire: The General
Resettlement of Indians in the Colonial Andes, ii) Andeans’ voluntary participation in the legal
system as litigants, and iii) efforts by the Inca royal family and other elites to integrate themselves
into the Spanish aristocracy. Mumford has studied Quechua in Bolivia, worked on archaeological
excavations in Peru, and was co-director of an NEH-funded spatial humanities project called “Deep
Mapping the Reducción: Toward a Historical GIS of the General Resettlement of Indians in the Vice-
royalty of Peru.”

Mumford’s current project is a microhistory of a marriage in Cuzco in 1565, in which a Christian
Inca noblewoman married off her 7-year-old daughter to a powerful Spanish settler in order to
effect an alliance between their two clans. Because child marriage was illicit, and this marriage was
against the viceroy’s wishes, it led to a criminal prosecution. The resulting trial record yields abundant
documentation not just of the marriage, but also of the linked worlds of the Inca and settler elites in
early colonial Cuzco.


This information is accurate as of the academic year 2021-22.