research overview
- Dr. Prieto's research interest is in Colonial Latin American literature, culture and history. He is particularly interested in 16th- and 17th-century South America and South American Jesuits. Recent work focuses on the slavery of native peoples as one of the fundamental features of the Chilean 17th century. By bringing slavery to the fore, he is proposing a reevaluation of the cultural and social history of the Chilean colonial period that moves away from the traditional views of a war-dominated society or a frontier society to one in which the Chilean colony is seen as a society based on and made possible by the enslavement of native peoples. Dr. Prieto also studies the different political and theological strife within the Jesuit order in Peru during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the impact these disagreements had for the Spanish colonial project in Peru and the Spanish empire writ large. This topic is addressed in his latest book, The Theologian and the Empire: A Biography of José de Acosta (Brill, 2024). Although Jesuit contributions to European expansion in the early modern period have attracted considerable scholarly interest, the legacy of José de Acosta (1540–1600) is still defined by his contributions to natural history. The Theologian and the Empire presents a new biography of Acosta, focused on his participation in colonial and imperial politics. The most important Jesuit active in the Americas in the sixteenth century, Acosta was fundamentally a political operator. His actions on both sides of the Atlantic informed both Peruvian colonial life and the Jesuit order at the dawn of the seventeenth century.
