Mónica Domínguez Torres’ book, Pearls for the Crown: Art, Nature and Race in the Age of Spanish Expansion, centers on a selection of key artworks tied to the pearl industry and demonstrates how European art legitimated racialized hierarchies and inequitable notions about humanity and nature that still hold sway today.

Pearls for the Crown was selected as one of the five finalists for 2025 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association, and it received honorable mention for the 2025 Eleanor Tufts book award from The Society for Iberian Global Art. At less than a year from being released, it has been very positively reviewed in two different journals Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme and Winterthur Portfolio.

University of Delaware Department of Art History Professor Domínguez Torres was appointed associate director of the Center for Material Culture Studies on September 1, 2024. She was a plenary session speaker (with Malinda Maynor Lowery, Emory University) for the workshop "Race, Place, and the Nonhuman in Early Modernity," organized by Hillary Eklund and Debapriya Sarkar, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C. (May 16, 2024), and presented her research at various national and international venues: 

• Submerged, Unearthed, Emergent: Early Modern Knowledge Under the Surface, international conference organized by Monica Azzolini and Rebecca Zorach at Villa I Tatti

• The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence, Italy (June 18, 2024)

• 36th CIHA World Congress Matter, Materiality, Lyon, France (June 25, 2024)

• Ibero-American Woodwork Galleries, at the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin (November 4, 2024)

• Reimagining the Américas: New Perspectives on Spanish Colonial Art symposium at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (November 9, 2024)

• Asia y las rutas de la imagen. Arte y cultura visual en los espacios ibero-asiáticos (siglos XVI-XVIII) international symposium at the University of Sevilla, Spain (December 13, 2024)

Ph.D. students Rebecca Stasiunus and Tiziana Capizzi joined Domínguez Torres at the Cornell University symposium for two days of conversations encompassing a variety of regions and approaches to colonial Latin American art history.