Catalina Ospina Jiménez

Catalina Ospina Jiménez joins the FAS as Assistant Professor in the History of Art. She is a scholar of Prehispanic and colonial Latin American material culture, focusing on the Andean and Amazonian regions. Her work explores how material objects and bodily practices contribute to knowledge production and transmission in South American cultures, challenging traditional text-centric approaches to intellectual history. This exploration coalesces in her current book project From Mouth to Hand: Mopa Mopa Practice in the Colonial Andes. Mopa mopa—a unique plant resin—was used by Indigenous Northern Andeans during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to decorate objects such as chests, gourds, and tabletop cabinets, mainly for the European and Creole markets. Focusing on the dazzling mopa mopa objects produced in the colonial period, the book drafts a history of their production, provides new perspectives on early global modern circulation processes, and nuances our understanding of how colonial structures inflicted injustices on colonial subjects in their capacity as knowers and intellectual producers. Recent publications delving into these topics include “Indigenous Knowledge and Women’s Cosmetics: Mopa Mopa in the Colonial Northern Andes” in Art History 46, no. 5 (2023, pp. 18–45); and “Between Sombreros and Diadems: A Pictorial Testament from Colonial Central Mexico” in Colonial Latin American Review 33, no. 2 (2024, pp. 1–33).