I am a historian of the Americas in the early modern period. I have a MSt in History from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaiso, Chile and a PhD in History from the University of Edinburgh, UK. As a Latin American and Chilean researcher, I am interested in the connections between America and Europe and the fabric of those connections. More specifically, I focus on those territories that were seen by Europe as "peripheries" and their relationship with the "centre". My doctoral thesis, "Imagined peripheries: English visions of Patagonia (1527-1694)" challenges the assumption that "peripheries", such as Patagonia, did not have a major impact on the way early modern empires conceived their expansion. On the contrary, Patagonia activated England's imagination of the Americas and the colonial opportunities that existed in the South Sea. My areas of interest are maritime history, cultural history, imagined geographies and most recently in the history of science. My research project for T@T, "The South Sea in the Scientific Revolution: Global connections, cultural encounters, colonial science and networks of knowledge (1600-1700)", aims to study how the interactions between European and South Sea societies gave rise to novel and local forms of science -“colonial science”- in the early modern period. I firmly believe that academic research goes hand in hand with teaching. In Chile, I was a tutor for the History of Latin America I and II (1500-1700)  and in Edinburgh I was a tutor for Early Modern History: A Connected World and The Historian's Toolkit. Now at Tuebingen I will be teaching "Imagined Geographies" and "Colonial Science".

I am a historian of early modern European history, with a specialisation in urban, religious, and spatial approaches. My research investigates how monarchical and religious influence interacted with civic authority within urban spaces during the early French Wars of Religion. My current book project, based on my doctoral dissertation and provisionally entitled ‘‘La ville eut l’éphémère honneur d’être comme la capitale du Royaume': A Spatial History of Charles IX’s Royal Tour of France, 1564–1566 (Angoulême, Lyon, Sens)’, explores how royal, civic, and religious actors utilized different urban spaces in France to project their own authority and promote religious toleration and co-existence through royal entrances amid religious warfare. My research incorporates primary source material such as festival books, financial records, correspondences, city council minutes, and maps. Prior to Tübingen, I have taught early modern European seminars at Durham University.

Weiao Xing is a cultural and literary historian of the early modern Atlantic world, focusing on English-Indigenous and French-Indigenous encounters from the late 16th to the early 18th centuries. He earned his PhD in History from the University of Cambridge in 2023 and was previously trained in translation studies, historical sociolinguistics, and liberal arts. For his doctoral research, Weiao Xing integrated digitised primary sources with rare books and manuscripts consulted in the UK, France, Canada, and the US. In 2023, Weiao Xing undertook short-term visiting fellowships at the British Library’s Eccles Centre for American Studies, the Huntington Library, and the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Currently, Weiao Xing is a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Modern History, University of Tübingen, hosted by Professor Renate Dürr. His ongoing project builds upon his thesis research on languages, translation, and encounters in the 17th-century North Atlantic world, aiming at producing a monograph that illustrates language learning and translingual knowledge production. Meanwhile, he is delving into the history of books and print culture, seeking to comprehend the early modern reception of the French Jesuit Relations and the translation of books on the Americas in Europe. As a historian with strong interdisciplinary interests, Weiao Xing has explored themes including language education in 17th-century Massachusetts, historical narratives in early 18th-century New England, and the dramas and historical accounts in 17th-century Québec. Beyond his academic engagement, Weiao Xing is a practitioner of public history. He has served as an editor for ‘Doing History in Public’, a blog series run by postgraduate historians at the University of Cambridge and has contributed posts to various platforms.