Dr. Ivonne del Valle is Associate Professor of Colonial Studies in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at UC Berkeley. Her research and teaching make connections between the past and the present to show the relevance of the colonial period for an understanding of contemporary times. She has written a book and a series of articles on the Jesuits (José de Acosta and Loyola, and Jesuits in the northern borderlands of New Spain) as a particularly influential politico-religious order that served modernization and the expansion of the Spanish empire. She was co-director of the Berkeley research group "Mexico and the Rule of Law." She is currently working on two projects: one on the drainage of the lakes of Mexico City, and the other on the role of the colonization of Spanish America from the 15th century onward in the development of new epistemologies and political theories.