Bianca Premo
Distinguished University Professor of Latin American History, Florida International University
Fellow 2026–27
- Current Project
- Peru’s Youngest Mother in the World and the Ethics of History
- Project Discipline
- History
- Fellowship Title
- Frank H. Kenan Fellowship
About Fellow
Bianca Premo is a Distinguished University Professor of Latin American history at Florida International University, with specializations in the social and legal history of Peru, the history of childhood, and a range of ancillary fields and regions including Mexico and early modern Spain. Her prize-winning publications include two monographs: The Enlightenment on Trial (Oxford, 2017; Spanish version Ilustración a juicio, Tirant lo Blanch 2026), and Children of the Father King (UNC Press, 2005). She’s published over a dozen articles and various book chapters on topics including the history of age, Indigenous legal history, disability studies, and the history of gender.
Premo’s current research expands her work into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and concerns the difficult subject of child motherhood and the ethics of writing about vulnerable historical subjects. It has been supported by fellowships from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She serves on the board of the American Historical Review.
Selected Publications
- Premo, Bianca. “Look at Looking: Staring at and Caring for Peru’s Youngest Mother in the World.” In Histories of Disability in Latin America, edited by Heather Vrana and David Carey, 27–56. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026.
- Premo, Bianca. “The Girl Who Jumped over Childhood: Peru’s Youngest Mother in the World, 1939.” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 19, no. 1 (2026): 22–45.
- Premo, Bianca. “Meticulous Imprecision: Calculating Age in Spanish Colonial Law.” American Historical Review 125, no. 2 (2020): 396–406.
- Premo, Bianca. The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Published in Spanish as La Ilustración a juicio: Litigantes y colonialismo en el Imperio español. Mexico City: Editorial Tirant lo Blanch, 2026.
- Premo, Bianca. Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.