Natalie Cobo

Dr. Natalie Cobo is an active Affiliate Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory since July 2025, previously serving as an External Researcher from 2016 to 2021. She co-founded a Colombian non-profit foundation (2015–present) dedicated to digitizing endangered archives and promoting digital humanities in Latin America.

Her academic credentials include:

• DPhil in History, University of Oxford (2016–2024), supervised by Prof. Alan Strathern; thesis: Conversion, ethnology, and law in the conquest of the Philippines
• MPhil in Classics, University of Cambridge (2013–2014), supervised by Prof. Carrie Vout; thesis: Infanticide in Ancient Art
• BA in Classics, University of Cambridge (2010–2013)

Cobo's research critically examines Spanish colonial legal frameworks through the lens of normative regime development, with specialized focus on early modern Philippines and Iberian colonial translation practices. Her work reveals how religious institutions like the Synod of Manila (1581–82) engineered moral authority through confession protocols and restitution systems, while her analysis of trans-Pacific trade routes demonstrates the Philippines' pivotal role in global colonial networks. She bridges legal anthropology with textual scholarship to expose how Latin legal traditions were adapted across Asian and American contexts.

Her publication trajectory shows consistent engagement with Pacific colonial dynamics, evolving from foundational archival work on Philippine legislation (2018) to contemporary analyses of maritime piracy's legal dimensions (2025). Recent outputs increasingly emphasize cross-cultural legal translation and the material production of normative behavior in mission contexts.

No scientific awards are documented in available records. Her research is sustained through institutional affiliation with the Max Planck Institute and leadership of the non-profit neogranadina.org, which executes large-scale digitization projects across Latin American archives. While formal advisees aren't listed, her collaborative publications with scholars like Thomas Duve and Tatiana Seijas indicate active mentorship within transnational research networks.

Cobo operates at the intersection of the Max Planck Institute's legal history research division and her non-profit's field operations, directing teams that combine digital humanities methodologies with traditional archival preservation. Current projects include All Translate Solórzano Iberian Worlds, which decodes early modern Latin legal manuscripts through comparative colonial frameworks.