Erica Feild-Marchello
I am a scholar of the cultures and history of early modern Iberian worlds. My research addresses questions regarding inclusion and exclusion, limpieza de sangre (blood purity), religious conversion, language, and translation across the diverse spaces encompassed by the Spanish empire. More specifically, I am interested in how linguistic knowledge production intersected with colonial constructions of religious and racial difference and the politics of race making. My current book project, Divine Word: Language, Religion and Race in the Spanish Empire argues that all kinds of people mobilized ideas about language to construct, negotiate, and contest early modern understandings of race. I am developing this research as a member of the ERC-funded project BADEMS: The Cultural History of the Black African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (https://webs.uab.cat/badems/).
From Sept 2022 to 2025 I was the Sir John Elliott Fellow of Early Modern Spanish Studies at Exeter College, Oxford University.
During the 2021 calendar year, I conducted dissertation research in Mexico City (hosted by Gibrán Bautista y Lugo, UNAM) and Seville (hosted by Manuel Herrero Sánchez, UPO) with support from a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship.
I completed my PhD in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at NYU. My advisor was Sibylle Fischer, and Zeb Tortorici and Jean-Frédéric Schaub were committee members.
From Sept 2022 to 2025 I was the Sir John Elliott Fellow of Early Modern Spanish Studies at Exeter College, Oxford University.
During the 2021 calendar year, I conducted dissertation research in Mexico City (hosted by Gibrán Bautista y Lugo, UNAM) and Seville (hosted by Manuel Herrero Sánchez, UPO) with support from a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship.
I completed my PhD in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at NYU. My advisor was Sibylle Fischer, and Zeb Tortorici and Jean-Frédéric Schaub were committee members.
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Papers by Erica Feild-Marchello
officials to Felipe II) frequently mobilized terminologies that contained
naturalized understanding of religious inheritance as they entered into debates
regarding the enslavement of Muslims (in the Philippines) and converts from
Islam and their descendants (in Spain).
Collaborations and Organization of Academic Events by Erica Feild-Marchello
“Protest and Dissimulation: Muslims and Other Minorities in the Spanish-Speaking World” will explore the challenges faced by religious and ethnic minority communities in the Spanish-speaking world from the Middle Ages through the present day and examine the strategies that those communities used to resist, circumvent, survive, and even flourish under the pressure of those challenges. Through discussion and conversation, the evening will yield questions and modes of thinking that are grounded in the unique histories, literatures, and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world and that participants, attendees, and discussants can carry with them out into the wider contemporary world that is presenting its own evolving set of challenges to many modern communities.
This round-table and teach-in will take place on Thursday, December 1, from 6-8pm in the Great Room of 13-19 University Pl. A light supper will be served and attendees are encouraged to continue the discussion over the meal. The event will be live-streamed and archived online.
Speakers will include:
Farah Dih, NYU: "A Caste Society in the First Spanish Modernity"
Erica Field, NYU: “Dissimulation, Piety, and Fear”
Sibylle Fischer, NYU: "Stop Whining: On Politics of Racelessness and Executive Violence in Spanish America"
Nicholas Jones, Bucknell University: “Do Black Lives Matter in Spanish Early Modernity? Blackness, Cognitive Dissonance, Dissimulation”
Seth Kimmel, Columbia University: “The Ends of Multiculturalism”
S.J. Pearce, NYU: “Medieval Jews and Muslims in the Modern Nation”
Workshop/Panel/Conference Organisation by Erica Feild-Marchello
– Oumelbanine Zhiri, University of California San Diego, “Morisco Writing Between Arabic and Spanish”
– Ugo Mondini, University of Oxford & Michele Didoli, University of Ghent, “A Language to Be Understood: Preaching in Greek in the Ottoman Empire, 1500s–1600s”
– Erica Feild-Marchello, Exeter College, University of Oxford, “‘It is among the oldest languages’: Arabic, Linguistic Histories, and Politics in Early Modern Spain”
– Julia Hernández, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library: “Performance Philology: Strategic Displays of Textual Criticism in Quevedo’s Anacreón castellano (1609)”
Chair: Pier Mattia Tommasino, Columbia University