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.