Biography

I hold a PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. My dissertation title is ‘De l’Islam à la Chrétienté : parcours d’assimilation dans la Monarchie hispanique (1574-1609)’.
I am an Early Modern historian of the Spanish Empire (Monarquía hispánica) and its relationship with the Ottoman Empire and Morocco during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries. My research deals with the analysis of Christian-Islamic interactions in the Mediterranean area. In particular, I am interested in exploring the practices of coexistence and interaction developing in situations of conflict.
In my dissertation I have examined the trajectories of captives and renegades who, having lived for a long period of time in Muslim societies, returned to the dominions of the Spanish Empire. I am also interested in analyzing other forms of human mobility in the Mediterranean, particularly, the arrival of Muslims and Jews who voluntarily came to the Spanish Empire and converted to Catholicism.
During my year at the EUI as Max Weber fellow, I will study the network deployed in the Mediterranean, as well as in the Euro-African Atlantic, by the Gasparo Corso brothers during the second half of the 16th century. By revealing interactions between trade practices and political mediation, the analysis of this network brings out many individual careers which were forged across Christendom and the Islamdic world.