I am a religious, cultural, and sensory historian specializing in interreligious relations in early modern Iberia and the Mediterranean. I hold a Dual BA in Spanish and Religious Studies from the University of New Mexico, and a Dual MA in History and Religious Studies from the University of Colorado Boulder.

My dissertation, Reconfigured and Remade: A Sensory History of Islamic Granada’s Reformation as a Civitas Christiana, 1474-1614, is an interdisciplinary study on the lived experiences of Granada’s inhabitants following the Castilian conquest of 1492. Under the rubric of sensory history, I bring together my training in religious, intellectual, and cultural history, Spanish literature, and religious studies to explore archives and uncover the history of underrepresented groups. I ask: What do the stories of blind merchants, converted day laborers, Morisca women, and widely-traveled slaves tell us about larger religious upheavals and changes in Europe, the Mediterranean, and Iberian Atlantic? My research explores the sensory worlds and untold narratives of Iberia’s Disabled Communities, religious minorities, and common workers – both free and enslaved – and how they navigated larger structures of governance. In doing so, I show how sensorial expressions of religious difference and conversion informed and sharpened categories of gendered, racial, and ethnic distinction. I argue that the conversion of Granada was as much an acoustic, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory enterprise as it was visual – a totalizing reformation that activated perceptions of difference across the wider sensorium and carried them to the far corners of the empire.

My work has been supported by the U.S. Fulbright Research Award, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society, and Religion, and the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS). I have conducted extensive research in archives across Spain and collaborated with scholars at the CSIC-CCHS, Madrid, the University of Granada, the UIMP, Santander, and the CSIC of Cataluña, Barcelona. I have worked for over 10 years with the Mediterranean Seminar, first as the Program Coordinator and currently, as the Editorial Assistant. Before coming to Princeton, I held multiple graduate and teaching assistant positions at the University of Colorado Boulder and worked as a Teaching Auxiliar for the Spanish Ministry of Education. I currently serve as Co-Organizer of Princeton University’s Race Before Modernity Book Club and work as a Teaching Fellow for the Princeton Global History Lab in collaboration with La Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (UNTREF), in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

List of Publications

“Melodies of Doves, Clamor from the Towers: The Dawn of Granada’s Sonic Conversion.” Sixteenth Century Journal. Forthcoming.

Review of Hearing the City in Early Modern Europe, edited by Tess Knighton and Ascensión Manzuela-Anguita. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 78, no. 2 (June 2019): 227-245.

“A Muslim in Europe A Christian in North Africa: Experiencing the Early Modern Mediterranean.” The Spain-North Africa Project Bulletin, December 29, 2019.