My primary research focus involves the often-overlooked ways in which a distinctive Hispanic Enlightenment played out in the global eighteenth century.  I argue that the contributions of Spain and its territories in the Americas reflect imperial ideologies and practices that must be understood in their transatlantic dimensions and in a context that was at the same time global and local. The eighteenth-century Hispanic empire faced a particular set of complex realities on the ground: the governance of imperial subjects and agents who included criollos (American-born Spaniards), Indigenous peoples, African-descendants, mestizos, mulatos and Spaniards; efforts to put in place enlightened reforms of the imperial political economy; scientific and philosophical debates about the nature of the New World; and the central role of religion. My research examines how enlightened ideas were applied and transformed in eighteenth-century Spanish America as a way of rethinking the global Enlightenment itself, and I have explored these questions in chapters included in edited collections.