Katherine Mills, Ph.D.

Katherine Mills is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Gerhard Wolf, working on a project that explores the entangled relationship between natural disasters and art production in Cuzco, Peru.  Her research more broadly questions the ways in which Latin American Colonial spaces, ranging from churches and convents to cities, were socially, artistically, and ritualistically produced and experienced throughout the Colonial Era.  Mills obtained a PhD in History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University in 2024, with a dissertation that examined the construction, decoration, and ritual use of Cuzco’s two convents, Santa Clara and Santa Catalina, throughout the seventeenth century.  Her doctoral research received generous support from the Thoma Pre-doctoral Fellowship and the Porter Travel Grant.  Mills also earned a MA in the History of the Early Modern Spanish Monarchy from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2014.  Her award winning Master’s thesis analyzed the seventeenth-century ritual uses of the Royal Monastery Las Descalzas Reales in Madrid. Additionally, Mills is a co-host with José Araneda Riquelme of the podcast "Las cosas tienen vida," which in 2024 won the RSA Grant for Public Engagement Project in Renaissance Studies.