University of Adelaide

ARC Research Fellow, History

About

Background:
After completing my PhD in 2007, I was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Studentship that enabled me to conduct two years of postdoctoral research in the archives of the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal. I came to Southampton in September 2008.
I published my first book on the persecution of the Jewish and Muslim minorities in Portugal in 2007 and have completed my second book, “Monstrosities of Nature: Inquisitors, Doctors and Ambiguous Gender in Early Modern Spain and Portugal”, which will soon be published.
I have been awarded a three-year research fellowship held at the University of Adelaide by the Australian Research Council and I am currently on research leave. See the section on my research for further details.

Research:
I am interested in the history of the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal (and their respective overseas empires) during the early modern period (1450-1750). My research focuses particularly on the history of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions and the various heretical groups that they persecuted. My other research interests include the history of the censorship of art in the early modern Hispanic world as well as the religious and social history of early modern Spain and Portugal.
At present, I am on research leave as a research associate at the University of Adelaide in Australia thanks to a major research award from the Australian Research Council. My research project is entitled: Cultivating Fear and Hatred of the “Other”: the development of officially sanctioned anti-Semitic and Islamophobic sentiment in Catholic Southern Europe (1500-1800).
This project examines the deliberate manipulation and cultivation of the fear and hatred of Jews and Muslims by both secular governments and the Catholic Church in southern Europe between 1500 and 1800. This was part of a deliberate drive to marginalise Jewish and Muslim minorities and construct a sense of collective identity around Catholicism.

This project offers a systematic study of surviving printed sources, analysing the development and nature of the rhetoric and vocabulary used to depict Muslims and Jews as inherently alien and hostile groups during the early modern period.
As part of this project, I am currently preparing the first critical edition, study and translation into English of the highly-influential seventeenth-century Spanish anti-Semitic polemic of Fray Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra Judios puesta en la torre de la Iglesia de Dios (Madrid, 1674).
In addition to this project, I am currently writing on book on the history of the censorship of works of art (sculptures, paintings, murals and pornography) by the Spanish Inquisition from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries.