Participant Info

First Name
Stephanie
Last Name
Cavanaugh
Country
Canada
State
Affiliation
University of Oxford
Website URL
https://smcavanaugh.com
Keywords
Conversion, converts, Moriscos, history of identification, Spain, Castile, Spanish Inquisition, Islamophobia, social history, cultural history, legal history, early modern, sixteenth century.
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

I am a historian of the early modern Spanish world and author of the forthcoming book The Morisco Problem and the Politics of Conversion in Early Modern Spain.

Beginning September 2019, I will be the Sir John Elliott Junior Research Fellow in Spanish History at the University of Oxford’s Exeter College. I recently completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship (2016-2018) with the Early Modern Conversions project at McGill University in Montréal, Canada.

I earned my PhD in History at the University of Toronto in 2016. My doctoral thesis, “The Morisco Problem and the politics of belonging in sixteenth-century Valladolid” was supervised by Dr. Mark Meyerson with committee members Dr. E. Natalie Rothman and Dr. Kenneth Mills. I have an M.A. in History from the University of Toronto and a B.A. in History and English from the University of New Brunswick. 

My research interests include religious conversion and colonial encounters in the early modern Spanish world. I study of ideas of difference and belonging in early modern Castile through an analysis of the transformations in political, juridical, and communal identities that formed part of the processes of religious conversion. Building on this work, my next research project investigates concepts of purity, race, and nation in reference to the forcibly converted Moriscos in the early modern Spanish Empire.

You can listen to me talk about my research in this interview on the podcast “Kingdom, Empire and Plus Ultra.”

Recent Publications

“Litigating for Liberty: enslaved Morisco children in sixteenth-century Valladolid,” Renaissance Quarterly 70, no.4 (Winter 2017): 1282-1320.

Media Coverage
Country Focus
Spain
Expertise by Geography
Atlantic, Spain, Western Europe
Expertise by Chronology
Pre-17th century, Early Modern
Expertise by Topic
Colonialism, Race, Religion, Slavery