dr. N (Natália) da Silva Perez

Biography

Natália da Silva Perez engages transnational and comparative perspectives on cultural history from 1600 to 1900. She focuses on the history of women of high and low social status as they interacted with their families, communities, and authorities. She also works on the historical development of public discourses about women. Another point of focus of her research is natural language processing tools for historical documents, with a special emphasis on domain adaptation to multilingual contexts with low resources, and on the development of tools for the mitigation of algorithmic bias in quantitative approaches to historical texts.

She is the principal investigator of the project Racialized Motherhood (2023-2028), a collaboration between Erasmus University Rotterdam and the University of Copenhagen funded by a Sapere Aude grant from the Independent Research Fund Denmark. Her research team uses data-driven methods to compare how early newspapers represented motherhood for women of different origins during the early modern colonial period. 

She supervises PhD, master's, and bachelor's research projects that focus on the history of women, intersectionality, diversity, knowledge-making, information, and discourse. She also guides students interested in employing methods from the digital humanities.