Mateo Mauricio Montoya is a historian of knowledge, religion, and political economy in the early modern Iberian world. He is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University, and he completed his PhD in the History of Science at Harvard University. His research examines the ways missionaries, officials, and Indigenous communities measured, classified, and governed political and economic life. His book project, Godly Government: Arts of the Good Life on the Jesuit-Guaraní Missions in Colonial Paraguay, 1609–1795, treats the missions as an enclave within the Spanish empire, and reads their account books, inventories, and books of orders as instruments through which a religious order made the good life a matter of provisioning and calculation, engaging an array of political and economic thought of the period along the way. His research has been supported by various institutions, including the John Carter Brown Library, the Huntington Library, and the New York Public Library.
