Alba Menéndez Pereda is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles where she specializes in Indigenous material and sensorial cultures. Specifically, her research examines the making and experiencing of sacredness at the heart of the Inca Empire from imperial Inca times through the early modern period. As an interdisciplinary archaeologist, Alba brings together architectural, artistic, and documentary evidence to reconstruct the material and sensorial realms of the Coricancha, the most important religious center in the Andes at the time. She approaches this corpus of material through a framework centered on place and the senses and in collaboration with experts in other fields including acousticians. Her research projects have been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the “la Caixa” Foundation, the John Carter Brown Library, the Huntington, the Society for Architectural Historians, and the Archaeological Institute of America, among others.
As a fellow at the ISM, she will consult ethnohistoric accounts, 20th-century reports on the Coricancha, and early photographic collections from the Andes housed in the Beinecke Library to gain a glimpse into how religion has been embodied in the Andes through time and how the Coricancha has changed in recent decades. Alba’s time at Yale will complement her studies at the site and in museums and archives in Peru, Spain, and the United States.