About

Natalia Sobrevilla Perea is a Professor of Latin American History at the University of Kent.
She specializes in the creation of nations and institutions during the nineteenth century in the Andes, and is particularly interested in how the understanding of the past can inform the practice of politics today.

Originally from Peru, she completed a degree in History at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, in 1996. That same year she received a Magister in History and Geography from the University of Vienna and in 1997 a M.A. at the Institute of Latin American Studies in London. In 2005 she obtained her PhD in History at the University of London.

Between 2004 and 2007 she was a member of the Program on Order, Conflict and Violence at Yale University. Where she started as a pre-doctoral fellow. She was then a visiting teaching fellow in International Studies where she taught undergraduates and masters students.

She was a visiting fellow at the John Carter Brown Library in 2009 and held grants from the British Academy, the British Library, the Leverhulme Trust and most recently the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation between 2017 and 2018, when she was visiting at the Freie Universität Berlin. Between 2015 and 2018 she led an International Network of scholars researching on the idea of nation and the wars of independence funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

In 2011, Cambridge University Press published her book The Caudillo of the Andes Andrés de Santa Cruz and in 2015, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos published it in Spanish.  She is the co-editor of The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian Atlantic World, The Impact of the Cádiz Constitution of 1812 that came out with Alabama University Press in 2015. Her most recent book Los Inicios de la República Peruana. Viendo más allá de “cueva de los bandoleros” was published in 2019 by Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.

She has published extensively on the creation of the state in Peru, focusing on elections, constitutions and the importance of the armed forces. Since 2018 she contributes with opinion pieces to Peruvian newspaper El Comercio and she is currently finalizing a book on the armed forces and the creation of the Peruvian State in the nineteenth century.