Heidi V. Scott is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She earned a PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2002 and taught at Aberystwyth University (Wales) before joining UMass Amherst in 2011. A historian and historical geographer of the colonial Andes, her work to date has focused on landscape experience and colonialism, cartography, and, most recently, on mining and subterranean imaginaries. She is author of Contested Territory: Mapping Peru in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Notre Dame U.P., 2009). In addition to contributing to edited volumes, she has published articles in Geoforum, Hispanic American Historical Review, Istor: Revista de Historia Internacional, Journal of Latin American Geography, Cultural Geographies, Journal of Historical Geography, and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. In 2015, Heidi guest-curated an exhibition entitled “Subterranean Worlds: Under the Earth in the Early Americas” at the John Carter Brown Library. In 2020-21 she co-organized the UMass Amherst history department’s Feinberg Lecture Series, entitled “Planet on a Precipice: Histories and Futures of the Environmental Emergency.” Currently she is completing a book manuscript entitled “Mining Places and Subterranean Spaces in Colonial Spanish America: Nature, Government, and Moral Debate in the Exploitation of the Underground.” Heidi teaches courses on colonial Latin American history, environmental history, and historical cartography.

Publications: single-authored books

In progress “Mining Places and Subterranean Spaces in Colonial Spanish America: Nature, Government, and Moral Debate in the Exploitation of the Underground.”

2009 Contested Territory: Mapping Peru in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.

Publications: articles and book chapters (since 2015)

In press “Mining, geological imaginations, and the politics of subterranean knowledge in the colonial Andes,” Geoforum https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.08.017

2020 “Between Potosí and Nuevo Potosí: Mineral Riches and Observations of Nature in the Colonial Andes, ca. 1590-1800,” in María del Pilar Blanco and Joanna Page, eds. Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America (Gainesville, FL.: University of Florida Press) 117-132.

2018 “De mapas, minas y socavones: La representación cartográfica de servicios a la minería en Huancavelica en la época tardocolonial,” Istor: Revista de Historia Internacional, 19 (73): 57-74.

2016 “The Promise and Peril of Gold Mining on Spanish and Portuguese Imperial Frontiers.” In The Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Latin American History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Published online.

2015 “Taking the Enlightenment Underground: Mapping Mining Spaces in the Late Colonial Andes,” Journal of Latin American Geography 14 (3): 7-34.

2015 “At the Center of Everything: Regional Rivalries, Imperial Politics, and the Mapping of the Mosetenes Frontier in Late Colonial Bolivia,” Hispanic American Historical Review 95 (3): 395-426.