My research interest is in the slave trade in fourteenth and fifteenth-century Italy – most particularly in Florence. My postdoctoral project expands my work on slavery and race geographically by focusing on the Western European Mediterranean, in particular, Marseille and Valencia.  My work is on the ground level, looking at the cultural exchanges of the slave trade and the social ramifications of domestic slavery in Florence. I look at cultural exchange not as imposed on the enslaved population but rather the enslaved populations’ effect on the cultural exchanges within Italy. I also focus on the economic considerations of the slave trade and its origins.

My current work deals with the racialization of the slave trade and the race-making of the late Medieval and Early Modern period prior to the establishment of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, with a particular focus on Florence and Florentine involvement in the slave trade both in the Eastern Mediterranean and in West Africa.

I am interested in merging my scholarship with digital humanities, especially through mapping the routes of the slave trade across the Mediterranean and TEI encoding to create a comprehensive search engine for Florentine documents.

I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University

Find me on academia.edu here.