Biographical details
Trained originally in Italian art history of the early modern period, I am now a specialist in Spanish visual studies, with particular interest in relations between the Spanish visual production of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the formation of the Spanish Empire. I am also interested in the interface between visual studies, notions and representations of different varieties of humanity, religion, and political thought.
My current research focuses on the overlooked area of the complex specificity of slave subjectivity in the visual form between the late fifteenth- and the eighteenth centuries in Imperial Spain and the New World.
I have been part of three international collaborative projects at the University of Granada, Spain:
- (2008-2010): on Anthropology of Slavery: Black Africans and their Descendents in Spain (1492-1886), sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science
- (2009-2012): on Contemporary European Reparations and Memory of Slavery: Black African Women Slaves and Spanish Women Abolitionists (16th-19th Centuries), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Equality (2010-13)
- (2011-2013): on Voices and Absences: Black African Slavery and Abolitionism in Spain (16th-19th Centuries), sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science
In 2009, I was interviewed for the programme Night Waves on BBC Radio 3 to review the exhibition of Spanish painting and sculpture (The Sacred Made Real) at The National Gallery in London. In 2011, I was interviewed by CNN online about the controversial case of Liverpool striker Luis Suarez, after he was found to have racially abused the Manchester United player Patrice Evra.
