Bianca Premo

Bianca Premo is a historian of Latin America, particularly Peru, and a university educator dedicated to thinking alongside the students she teaches in Miami. She is the author of many articles and two award-winning books on the themes of law, children, and Spanish colonialism in the Americas—all focused, in some way, on how people in the past who did not write what remains in the archive left their imprints on history nonetheless. Her recent work on precocious puberty and child pregnancy in twentieth- and twenty-first century Peru is carrying her into new fields, such as the history of medicine, journalism, and visual studies. But its greatest challenge is ethical. Although focused on the “youngest mother in the world,” it involves not writing an individual’s story but illuminating our own power to decide who is a historical subject.

Photo Credit: Anna Claire Levitt