Biography

I am a historian of the Iberian world, with a particular interest in religion, material culture, and medicine during the early modern period.
I completed my PhD at the Johns Hopkins University under the supervision of Richard Kagan. My dissertation examines the early modern Iberian world with particular emphasis on global Catholicism. I look at the Jesuits’ sacred economy in which news, medicine, images, and hagiographies disseminated globally. What made this possible was an empirical epistemology wherein the gathering of sense data was used to assess and represent their surroundings. In sum, I seek to explore where religion, historiography, medicine, and visual culture meet amid Iberian expansion.
To pursue my archival research in Spain and Italy, I have received fellowships from the Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe. I was also a Helen Watson Buckner Memorial Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library for 2014-15.
While at the EUI, I plan to expand my understanding of the Lusophone world as I produce articles and develop my dissertation into a first book. In addition, I wish to lay the groundwork for my subsequent project, which examines hispanophobia during the 16th and 17th centuries.