Biography
I spent part of my childhood in London and Washington D.C., and grew up in Italy. I became interested in Iberian history when I was an undergraduate student at the University of Pisa, before moving to the Scuola Normale Superiore for my PhD. I completed my thesis on the early modern Portuguese imperial ideology in 2008. Then I taught in Viterbo and Florence before coming to Exeter College in 2017. What I like most about Oxford is its vibrant and global intellectual community. At Exeter I have the chance to have exciting conversations with historians and scholars of Golden Age Spanish Literature in a friendly and informal atmosphere. In my spare time, I love to pick up a novel and go to read it in a café.
Research
I am interested in the history of the early modern empires of Portugal and Spain. The multiple ways in which the Iberian explorations contributed to the shaping of political and cultural interactions across the globe has particularly fascinated me. I am now carrying out new research on visual dissent and the art of political insult in the Portuguese and Spanish overseas possessions. My other major field of interest is the history of the Iberian religious world, especially the Inquisition, missions and the agency of converts.
Teaching
I teach Exeter undergraduates in all aspects of early modern history. I am keen to hear from potential graduate students interested in the early modern Iberian world or early modern global history more generally.
Selected publications
‘Portuguese Mercenary Networks in Seventeenth-Century India: An Experiment in Global Microhistory and Its Archive’, Journal of Early Modern History 27, no. 1-2 (2023)
‘Iberian Theories of Empire in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Journal of the History of Ideas 83, no. 4 (2022)
The Globe on Paper: Writing Histories of the World in Renaissance Europe and the Americas (Oxford University Press, 2020)
‘Iberian Explorations: The Construction of Global Empires (1450-1650)’, in The Iberian World, 1450-1820, ed. Fernando Bouza, Pedro Cardim, and Antonio Feros (2019)
‘Killing Images: Iconoclasm and the Art of Political Insult in Sixteenth and Seventeent Portuguese India’, Itinerario 42, no. 3 (2018) [coauthored with Jorge Flores]
‘Too Much to Rule: States and Empires across the Early Modern World,’ Journal of Early Modern History 20, no. 6 (2016)
