Mónica Domínguez Torres is Associate Professor at the Department of Art History of the University of Delaware, with a joint appointment in Latin American and Iberian Studies. She specializes in the arts of the early modern Iberian World, with particular interest in cross-cultural exchanges between Spain and the Americas during the period 1500–1700. Her book Military Ethos and Visual Culture in Post-Conquest Mexico (Ashgate, 2013) investigates the significance of military images and symbols in sixteenth-century Mexico, showing how certain martial notions and symbols created cultural bridges between Mesoamericans and Europeans. She also published several essays on the production, regulation, and consumption of indigenous heraldry in Mexico and Peru. During her stay at Bard Graduate Center, she will be working towards completing her new book-length project, Pearls for the Crown: European Courtly Art and the Atlantic Pearl Trade, 1498–1728, which examines the cultural and political currency that pearls had in the early modern period. The book explores a selection of images and collectibles related to the Atlantic pearl industry in relation to the interplay between materiality, labor, and consumption that shaped artistic production in early modern Europe. Specifically, it discusses the discourses these pieces articulated about imperial expansion, providential wealth, and human mastery over nature, notions of crucial importance in courtly circles linked to the Spanish Crown.