Nicole T. Hughes is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. Her research focuses on late medieval Iberia and the early modern Iberian worlds, especially New Spain and Brazil. Her research interests include early modern drama (the sixteenth century in particular), history of the religious orders, the inheritance of medieval culture in the Americas, colonial architecture and the creation of symbolic spaces, questions of the archive in the New World including indigenous languages and translation practices, and the relationship between inquisition and global empire. Before joining Columbia, she received a M.A. in Comparative Literature from NYU and edited works of non-fiction as assistant editor to The Penguin Press. In 2012 and 2014, she studied Nahuatl in its modern and classical variants at the IDIEZ Institute (Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas). She has published translations from Spanish to English and has presented her work at various international conferences.