Diana Berruezo-Sánchez
Diana Berruezo-Sánchez is an ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Principal Investigator of BADEMS.
She has taught and conducted research at the University of Oxford, the University of Barcelona, and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Diana has received funding from the European Research Council, the Newberry Library, the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, The Leverhulme Trust, The John Fell Fund, and the Balliol Interdisciplinary Institute to lead research projects at both Oxford and Barcelona. She has also been awarded contracts and grants from the Spanish Ministry of Education, the Community of Madrid, Fundación Ibercaja, and Fundació Agustí Pedro i Pons. Her research stays have included the Newberry Library (Chicago), the Hispanic Society of America (New York), and the University of Seville.
Diana Berruezo-Sánchez has pioneered a line of research on the cultural legacy of the sub-Saharan diaspora in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, earning recognition from international institutions and publishing her findings with leading academic presses and journals. Her works include the monograph Black Voices in Early Modern Spanish Literature, 1500–1750 (Oxford University Press, 2024), the co-edited volume Iberia Negra (Routledge, 2024), and an article on Gaspar, a seventeenth-century Black fencer and poet, published in Bulletin of the Comediantes (2022). She has led groups and projects on this subject, such as The Making of Blackness (2022–2025) and the research workshops Black Iberia (2022) and Black Africans’ Agency (2020).
Gerard Rosich Pagès
Gerard Rosich works as a scientific coordinator for the BADEMS project. As a collaborator, Rosich will support the PI in coordinating the project’s interdisciplinary team, ensuring that individual sub-projects align with the overarching theoretical framework. His role includes synthesising findings, providing methodological oversight, and framing outputs within a unified narrative.
He is a historical sociologist with a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Barcelona. He previously worked as a predoctoral researcher at the ERC-AdG research project Trajectories of Modernity, led by Peter Wagner and hosted by the University of Barcelona (2010–2015). He later held a postdoctoral research position at the Department of World Cultures of the University of Helsinki, as part of the HERA Research Project The Debt: Historicizing Europe’s Relations with the ‘South’. Rosich’s research spans conceptual and intellectual history, social and political theory, and historical sociology. His current work focuses on the origins of early modern global imperialism and its connections to histories of racialisation, with particular attention to Europe’s ambivalent role in modern history.
He has published extensively on the theory and history of modernity, human autonomy, the use of historical narratives to address past injustices, and the methodological and normative challenges inherent to historical reconstructions. Among his many publications, Rosich has authored two monographs: Autonomy: The Contested History of a European Legacy (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) and Independència i Autonomia: Una teoria històrica de la modernitat (Editorial Afers, 2017).
Nuno Vila-Santa
Nuno Vila-Santa is a historian and a post-doctoral researcher at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. As part of the BADEMS project, he studies the cultural legacy of Black and Afro-Hispanic communities in the Spanish region of Extremadura and in Portugal.
He holds a BA, MA and PhD in Early Modern History and Portuguese Expansion from the Nova University of Lisbon. His work has been devoted to Portuguese Asia in the second half of the sixteenth century. Recently, he has conducted research in areas such as the circulation of Portuguese maritime knowledge towards Europe.
His books on D. Luís de Ataíde, viceroy of India, and Francisco Barreto, governor of India and Mutapa, were awarded prizes in 2015 and 2021. In 2024, he published a book titled Knowledge Exchanges between Portugal and Europe: Maritime Diplomacy, Espionage and Nautical Science in the Early Modern World (15th-17th centuries) (Amsterdam University Press).
Elizabeth Blakemore
Elizabeth Blakemore (she) is a postdoctoral researcher at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her research as part of BADEMS focuses on the role of Afro-Hispanic confraternities as a space for cultural production, transcultural interactions, identity and community building, and the preservation of African religious and cultural practices.
She completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2024, where she also worked as a tutor in Hispanic Language and Cultures for the past four years. Her research explores the racialisation of religion and cultural minorities, specialising in the representation of the moriscos in the Spanish literary imaginary.
She has two upcoming publications based on her research on the characterisation of the moriscos in the Alpujarras chronicles, Lope de Vega’s drama, and Cervantes’s prose fiction.
Cristina Hernández Casado
Cristina Hernández Casado is a postdoctoral researcher at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. As part of the BADEMS project, she is currently interested in the study of Black communities and their cultural activities in Madrid.
She graduated with a PhD in History from the Complutense University of Madrid in 2023. She then carried out interdisciplinary research at the University of Burgos, providing historical perspectives to the literary-based project Ámbitos literarios de sociabilidad en el siglo de oro: El teatro escrito en colaboración en su contexto, nuevos instrumentos de investigación. She is also a member of the project NOBINCIS: Nuevas noblezas de la Monarquía Hispánica, the research group HERMESP Élites y agentes en la Monarquía Hispánica and the node “NOBINCIS” of Red Columnaria. Her research has been devoted to early modern businessmen and women, Atlantic trade, network analysis, and social promotion strategies in the Hispanic Monarchy. She has conducted research stays in Spanish and Portuguese institutions.
She has published several articles and book chapters, such as “Trade, Credit, and Marriage: The Mobility of Portuguese Conversa Merchants and Financiers” in Early Modern Women’s Mobility, Authority, and Agency Across the Spanish Empire, (coordinated by Anne J. Cruz and Alejandra Franganillo Álvarez, Amsterdam University Press 2024). Her book-length monograph Capital y poder en la Monarquía Hispánica (1580-1660). Jorge de Paz Silveira, los hermanos Pasariño y las redes de negocio judeoconversas was published in 2024.
Jacobo de Camps Mora
Jacobo de Camps is a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral researcher at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
He holds a degree in Humanities from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and completed his master’s and doctoral studies at the faculties of Hispanic and Germanic Letters at the University of Oxford. He has carried out doctoral stays at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of the Free University of Berlin, the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Humboldt University and the Histories research group at the University of Southern Denmark.
He has been a researcher and professor of Hispanic Literature of the Golden Age at the University of Oxford.
Magdelena Diaz Hernández
Magdalena Díaz Hernández is a postdoctoral researcher at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona within the BADEMS project. She currently investigates the cultural legacy of Afro-Hispanic communities in early modern Granada.
She graduated with a PhD in History from the University of Seville in 2014, carrying out her research at different national and international institutions, such as the University of Granada, the Institute of Historical Research of the Autonomous University of Mexico and Dr. José María Luis Mora Research Institute (Mexico). She also taught as a lecturer at the University of Huelva, the University of Murcia and the University of Querétaro (Mexico). Her research has been devoted to the study of conflicts between Indigenous American and Black populations. She has worked as well with a wide variety of disinformation sources in the Iberian-Atlantic framework (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries).
She has published articles in Mexican Studies, Anuario de Estudios Americanos, eHumanista: Journal of Iberian Studies, Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, Chronica Nova, and Naveg@merica.
Rubén Bracero Salvat
Rubén Bracero Salvat is a predoctoral researcher and FPU fellow at the Department of Spanish of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. His doctoral thesis, inscribed within the BADEMS project, studies racial constructions in early modern Iberian performative texts.
He read Hispanic Studies at the University of Barcelona, where he received the 2022-2023 Extraordinary End-of-Degree Award. In 2024, with funding from Fundació Universitària Agustí Pedro i Pons, he earned a Master of Studies in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford, specialising in Spanish and Portuguese. His master’s dissertation looked at the performativity of Iberian villancicos de negros and was awarded the prize for the best dissertation in the Sub-Faculty of Portuguese at Oxford. He is currently also a member of the research project The Making of Blackness, where he coordinates the 2024-2025 seminar series.
In 2024 he digitalised and published in Taylor Editions a collection of villancicos held by the Bodleian Library.
Eduardo Corona Pérez
Eduardo Corona Pérez is a postdoctoral researcher at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. As a member of the BADEMS project, he is responsible for finding and tracking the life and work of Black cultural agents in the historical archives of Lower Andalusia.
He graduated with a PhD from the University of Seville in 2021, where he was then awarded a Margarita Salas postdoctoral contract. During that time, he conducted a research stay at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Brazil). His historiographical work has been devoted to the social and comparative study of slavery in Seville and its archbishopric during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, being recently extended to eighteenth-century Minas Gerais.
He is the author of the monograph Trata atlántica y esclavitud en Sevilla (ca. 1500-1650) (University of Seville Press, 2022) and co-editor of the books Esclavas, horras y libres. Historias de mujeres en los mundos ibéricos (siglos XVI-XIX) (University of Seville Press, 2023) and El conocimiento como innovación. Nuevas propuestas didácticas para la enseñanza universitaria de la Edad Moderna (Dykinson, 2024). He has also coordinated the dossiers Esclavos: del debate historiográfico al gran público (Andalucía en la Historia) and Esclavitud, cotidiano y dinámicas de mestizajes en los mundos ibéricos (siglos XVI-XVIII): espacios, movilidad, acuerdos y conflictos (Varia Historia). He has published more than twenty scientific articles and book chapters, as well as several reviews and outreach works. In addition, he has participated in over 40 scientific meetings in Spain, Portugal, Austria, the United Kingdom, France, Brazil, and Peru.