Humanities Decanted: Juan Cobo Betancourt

Join us for a dialogue with Juan Cobo Betancourt (History) about his new book, The Coming of the Kingdom: The Muisca, Catholic Reform, and Spanish Colonialism in the New Kingdom of Granada. The Coming of the Kingdom explores the experiences of the Indigenous Muisca peoples of the New Kingdom of Granada (Colombia) during the first century of Spanish colonial rule. Focusing on colonialism, religious reform, law, language, and historical writing, Cobo Betancourt examines the introduction and development of Christianity among the Muisca, who, from the 1530s, found themselves at the center of the invaders’ efforts to transform them into tribute-paying Catholic subjects of the Spanish crown. The book illustrates how successive generations of missionaries and administrators approached the task of drawing the Muisca peoples to Catholicism at a time when it was undergoing profound changes, and how successive generations of the Muisca interacted with the practices and ideas that the invaders attempted to impose, variously rejecting or adopting them, transforming and translating them, and ultimately making them their own.

Juan Cobo Betancourt is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on questions of religion, colonialism, law, and language in colonial Latin America, with a focus on the New Kingdom of Granada (modern-day Colombia). Alongside this work, he co-founded Neogranadina, a Colombian non-profit foundation devoted to safeguarding the holdings of endangered archives and libraries through digitization, and to developing digital tools and resources to make them available to broad audiences.

Refreshments will be served.