Erica Feild-Marchello

Erica Feild-Marchello is a postdoctoral researcher at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

           Her research addresses questions regarding inclusion and exclusion, limpieza de sangre (blood purity), religious conversion, language, and translation across the Spanish empire. Her current book project, Divine Word: Language, Religion and Race in the Spanish Empire examines how linguistic knowledge production intersected with constructions of religious and racial difference.

As a member of BADEMS, she also looks forward to developing research on how Africans and Afrodescendants intervened in processes of evangelization as translators and interpreters in early modern Seville, and on the relations and day-to-day interactions between members of Black diaspora and morisco communities.

From Sept 2022 to 2025 she was the Sir John Elliott Fellow of Early Modern Spanish Studies at Exeter College, Oxford University. While there, she was PI of the project, “Arabic and Spanish” (supported by Oxford’s PCER Fund), which explored how to use public humanities events to discuss the socio-political importance that Arabic has had in Spain in the longue-durée, from the medieval period to today. One of the project outputs will be written guides that introduce university students to the many roles that Arabic has played in Granada and Madrid throughout history and the significance of the language in both cities today.

She completed her PhD in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at NYU in 2022. Thanks to support from a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship, in 2021, she conducted research in Mexico City (UNAM) and Seville (UPO). Her published and forthcoming research can be found in: The Sixteenth Century Journal, the edited volume, Soundscapes of the Early Modern Hispanophone and Lusophone Worlds (ed. Víctor Sierra Matute), Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez (accepted), and Renaissance Studies (under review).