Javier R. Ardila is a historian from the National University of Colombia. He is in the third year of his PhD in history at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a researcher for the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History—ICANH (2019-2022), the Central and Historical Archives of the National University of Colombia (2017-2021), and the National Museum of Colombia (2017-2019). His work focuses on books, libraries, readers, and knowledge circulation during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Latin America, particularly in the former Viceroyalty of the New Kingdom of Granada. He is the author of De Voltaire a Balmes. La reconstrucción the la biblioteca de José Manuel Groot (1800-1878) (2023), coeditor of Nobleza e Ilustración. Nuevo Reino de Granada, 1719-1819 (2025), A dos siglos de diferencia. Fuentes para una historia de las independencias colombianas (2025), and El ajedrez del Bicentenario. Pedagogía del teatro para la enseñanza de la historia (2023); and author of several articles published in Libraries: Culture, History, and Society, Historia Crítica, Historia y Espacio, Procesos and Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura.