Dr N.P.A. Vallen (Nino)

Dr. Nino Vallen is an Assistant Professor of Early Modern Cultural History. He studied history at Radboud University (2010) and received his PhD from Freie Universität Berlin (2016). He was a fellow of the International Research Training Group "Between Spaces," the Slicher van Bath De Jong Fund (CEDLA, Amsterdam), and the Pacific Office of the German Historical Institute Washington. In 2021, he received a Career Development Award from the Berlin University Alliance. As Visiting Scholar, he has been affiliated with the Colegio de México, Princeton University, the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Nino's research focuses on the Spanish empire and its colonies in the Americas and Asia. His first book, Being the Heart of the World (Cambridge 2023) describes the history of Spanish activity in the Pacific during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and its impact on Mexico's colonial society. Examining maps, reports, petitions, tracts and objects, this book shows how officials, soldiers, clergy and others debated how a globalizing world should look like and who should or should not share in the newly created wealth and opportunities.

In his ongoing research, Nino focuses on the interaction between distributive questions and the production of representations of the world in its entirety. A first line of research focuses specifically on how individuals of Indigenous and African descent interacted with the Spanish imperial apparatus to improve their position and how new notions of globality and universality helped them do so. A second line of research asks more broadly how planetary thinking influenced how early modern societies distributed their wealth and benefits.