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María del Pilar Ramírez Restrepo


  PhD Fellow
Home institution: University of California, Santa Barbara
Time at IEG: 2025
Funding: IEG Fellowship
Research topic: Unraveling the Orinoco’s “Labyrinth of Languages”: Linguistic Knowledge and Jesuit Missions in the Margins of the Spanish Empire, 1660-1784
  "My research project seeks to connect the history of linguistics as a science with Catholicism and Spanish colonialism in the early modern period. Specifically, it offers a political history of Jesuit missions in the Orinoco basin in northeastern South America by examining language policies and linguistic knowledge from 1660 to 1780. By situating these missions within local, regional, and imperial contexts, it demonstrates how the production and circulation of linguistic knowledge were central to the creation and operation of the missions, and to expand Spanish control into the area. At the same time, it shows how these efforts were central to the development of the science of linguistics."