Nicolás Sánchez-Rodríguez is a scholar of nineteenth-century Latin American literature and culture, political economy, and money. His research lies at the intersection of literary studies and capitalism’s financial and administrative cultures. 

At Princeton, he is working on his first book, "The Minted-City: Money, Extractivism, and Written Culture in Nineteenth-Century Colombia, 1822-1903." The manuscript, a study of financial instruments (bonds, stocks, and paper money), argues that paper technologies for representing value flourished in the 1800s in Colombia’s neocolonial setting thanks to the development of a heterogeneous network of subsidiary genres of writing, which included business prospectuses, accounting books, the economic press, and novels. It shows how, by allowing all substance to be translated to paper for its administration, this boom of writings facilitated local elites, in alliance with British capitalists, with novel ways to extract wealth from subaltern populations and to circulate that wealth between such global centers of calculation as Bogotá and London.

Originally trained in operations research and finance, Sánchez-Rodríguez holds a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies from Duke University and an M.A. in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from Paris-Sorbonne University and the Universidad de los Andes. Before coming to Princeton, he was the Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University’s Pembroke Center.

In Spring 2024, he plans teach a course on "Narco Aesthetics in Colombia and Mexico."