Associate Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

(Spring 2027)

This book project explores the experiences of Romani (gitano) families as they bore the brunt of early modern Spanish policies that sought to criminalize a distrusted ethnic minority. From the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, the Romani were targeted by a series of decrees that banned them from traveling as well as settling in cities. Men were routinely rounded up and sent to the galleys, effectively dismantling Romani families over generations and creating cascading effects on women and children. Amidst growing pressures as a global empire, ongoing warfare, and increasingly political and economic instability, early modern Spain embraced a series of policies and institutions aimed at repressing or eliminated various ethnic and religious minorities. I investigate how existential anxieties over security, safety, and belonging were expressed by ordinary people, and how localities appropriated central directives to initiate their own processes of exclusion. Some of these impulses to exclude were centuries old, yet they acquired new urgency during the early modern crises. Laying at the intersection of studies of incarceration, gender, and family, my project investigates the ways in which early modern society normalized processes of exclusion.

My project uses the past to reflect upon modern anxieties about outsiders, an effort fundamentally grounded in the humanities. Effectively, my project is an exercise in historical empathy. The records left to us by the Romani are testament to a vibrant culture that was deliberately suppressed by an early modern global empire, with repercussions in the present: I am interested in placing the Romani firmly in their social and cultural world of early modern religious and ethnic persecution, but the Romani are still a persecuted minority today. I am also concerned with drawing modern comparisons with family separation policies and the trauma on children vis-à-vis the incarceration of parents. In separating Romani families, early modern Spaniards were rehearsing modern practices. Via my study of the criminalization of early modern Romani, we may catch a glimpse of how future people will question our current policies, likely also observing our own ambivalences and uncertainties about a system we inhabit.