Natália da Silva Perez

A Little Bit About Me

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In my research, I focus on transnational and comparative perspectives on cultural history from 1600 to 1900. I examine the history of women of high and low social status as they interacted with their families, communities, and authorities. I also study the historical development of public discourses about women. I collaborate on the development of natural language processing tools for historical documents, with a special emphasis on domain adaptation to multilingual, low resources contexts, and on mitigation of algorithmic bias in quantitative approaches to historical texts.

I am the PI of two research projects about women's history:

"That's Women's Work!" A mixed-methods multilingual diachronic analysis of cultural discourse about gendered labour in the colonial-imperial nexus (2026-2031), funded by a Vidi grant from the Dutch Research Council and hosted at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Racialized Motherhood: Documenting and Analysing Early Modern Discourses on Reproduction (2023-2028), funded by a Sapere Aude grant from the Independent Research Fund Denmark and hosted at the University of Copenhagen in collaboration with the Erasmus University Rotterdam.

My research group combines qualitative historical analysis with advanced quantitative methods, including machine learning and AI, to analyze how gender and racial bias propagated through culture over time.

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