Laura Fahrenkrog

Laura Fahrenkrog is Associate Professor of History at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (Chile). Her research centers on musical practices in colonial Spanish America, examining their connection to social and cultural problems, labor, and colonial categories. Her most recent book is Musical Practices and Mobility in Asunción: Indigenous Musicians in Colonial Paraguay (Lexington Books, 2025).

Her DRCLAS project focuses on studying Indigenous musicians in the Viceroyalty of Peru (16th–18th centuries) and considers three interrelated themes: identities, mobilities, and material culture. The main goal is to examine these topics in an integrated, interdisciplinary manner to better understand musical practices in the Viceroyalty of Peru as complex manifestations that involved intertwined dimensions, such as Indigenous agency and colonial labor systems.

She is the author of "De indígenas y cascabeles: aproximación a los recorridos y valoraciones de un objeto sonoro en Hispanoamérica colonial (siglos XVI-XVII)" (Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, 2025); “Music in Paraguay”, Oxford Bibliographies in Music, (Oxford University Press, 2023), and articles published in academic journals in the United States, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Spain. Her research has received support from the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo of Chile. She received the 2018 Miguel Cruchaga Tocornal Award from the Academia Chilena de la Historia for her doctoral dissertation. Her book Los "indios cantores" del Paraguay. Prácticas musicales y dinámicas de movilidad en Asunción colonial (siglos XVI-XVIII) (Sb Editorial, 2020) is the 2021 winner of the Clarence H. Haring Prize in Latin American History from the American Historical Association.