Milan Francis is research assistant working on the MATERIA project. He is a historian and Latin Americanist whose research explores the relationship between material and visual culture, race, and identity across the Iberian colonial world, specializing in indigenous histories of resistance in the Andean altiplano of present-day Peru and Bolivia. He studied History at Ghent University and Latin American Studies at the University of Amsterdam. His master’s thesis at Ghent University on the Túpac Amaru Revolution (1780-1783) was awarded the André Schaepdrijver Prize (2023).

He is currently developing the project “Desde ahora se denombrarán Collas”: inter-ethnic cross-dressing in the shadow of ‘race war’, supported by the Slicher van Bath de Jong Foundation, which examines how material culture shaped notions of race and Indianness during the Túpac Amaru Revolution.

He previously worked as a research assistant at UCLouvain and the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam. At the IISH, he contributed to the creation of the Exploring the Slave Trade in Asia (ESTA) database, reconstructing the global slave trade within Dutch and Iberian colonial worlds. He also assisted in the development of a Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) model for AI-assisted transcription of early modern Spanish and Portuguese manuscripts.

At King’s College London, Milan is a research assistant on the MATERIA project, where he contributes to the development of a database on New Christian involvement in global commodity networks, trade, and patterns of consumption and taste.