Manuel “Manny” Medrano is a PhD candidate in Latin American history at Harvard University. He is an historian of both premodern and modern Latin America, with a regional focus on Andean South America and expertise in book history, Indigenous history, and the global history of science. His dissertation, When the Incas Wrote: A Global History of the Andean Quipu, examines debates about quipus—undeciphered knotted-string records—which Indigenous Andeans used for recordkeeping before, during, and after the Spanish colonial period. The project centers these texts to explore the boundary between prehistory and history, as well as Indigenous and European ideas about reading, writing, and literacy between the 16th and 20th centuries. His research and teaching span preconquest through modern Latin American history.

Manny is a Junior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography and a William R. Tyler Fellow in Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. He is the author of Quipus. Mil años de historia anudada en los Andes y su futuro digital (Planeta, 2021), and his writing has appeared in Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society, Latin American Antiquity, Ethnohistory, and The Hispanic American Historical Review. Publicly, his research has been featured by NPR, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, The BBC, and Google Arts & Culture. He holds an MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a BA in Applied Mathematics from Harvard College, magna cum laude.