Montero is currently revising her first book, What the Hummingbird Knows: A Natural History, a study on the genre of early modern natural history and its capacious quality to incorporate various forms of epistemic agency, particularly that of indigenous Nahua intellectuals. Focusing on the case of the hummingbird - an animal endemic to the Americas and central to many native communities along the hemisphere but absent from the Western historical record before 1492 - this study analyses, firstly, what exactly happened when different views of nature met in the Valley of Mexico c. 1519 and, secondly, how the knowledge coproduced in that context travelled and metamorphosed for three centuries. Drawing from philological analysis, indigenous material culture and oral and visual histories, the book starts by bringing to the fore the intentionality of indigenous intellectuals to use early modern genres for their memory-keeping purposes, as they deployed linguistic and visual encoding in these works. The book then follows how these indigenous ideas about nature, the seasons and "the first among birds," travelled in natural histories, encyclopedias, medical treatises, emblem books and early scientific journals changing in meaning and purpose, but still clearly stemming from that early corpus produced in collaboration. Moving beyond a discourse on indigenous knowledge lost in translation, What the Hummingbird Knows ultimately argues for the potential of reconstructing indigenous agency through interdisciplinary practice, through putting in dialogue the material, visual and oral evidence produced in the Americas since pre-Columbian times with the textual and experimental record of the Western sciences of animals.

In parallel, Montero is starting work on two new projects. The first one, Souls for Silver: Order, Virtue and Extraction in the Colonial Americas, examines the world-making dyad of Christian doctrine and extractivism in five sweeping episodic accounts ranging from the 15th-century Caribbean to 19th-century North America. The second project, News of the Whaling Folk, takes a look at the Spanish exploration of Nuu-chah-nulth territory in Vancouver Island in the late 18th century, and explores how this encounter questioned existing Iberian ideas about equality between peoples, and kinship between humans and more-than-humans.

2024 Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award

2021 Robert F. Heizer Award for Best Article in the field of Ethnohistory, American Society for Ethnohistory

2021 Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (fall 2021)

2021 Honorable mention, Best Essay Prize in Colonial Latin American and Caribbean Studies by a young scholar, Latin American Studies Association

2017 Honorable mention, DHST Young Scholars Prize for Best Dissertation in any topic, region or period, International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology

American Historical Association

American Society for Ethnohistory

History of Science Society

Latin American Studies Association

Modern Language Association

Renaissance Society of America

Sixteenth Century Society and Conference

Montero has taught previously at the Institute of Philosophical Research (UNAM) in Mexico City and currently teaches in the Hispanic Studies Department and the Science and Technology Studies Program at Brown.

As part of her service to the university, Montero coordinates the Nahuatl courses at Brown (NAHU 0100, 0200, 0300, 0400 and 0500) taught by Eduardo de la Cruz, with the support of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program and the Center for Language Studies.