I’m Beatriz
I have a combined background of History (BA, MA, Universidad Complutense, Madrid) and Archaeology (MA, PhD, Universidad Complutense, Madrid) with a focus on the material culture of colonialism.
I am currently a Derby Fellow at the Department of Archaeology and the Department of History at the University of Liverpool. I work on a project on Indigenous slavery and agency in the Caribbean (16th-18th centuries) in which I focus on the enslavement of Kalinago and Taíno people, but I also bring to the forefront the agency of Kalinago and Taíno communities in successfully fighting against European colonialism by rebelling, resisting, and taking numerous captives and thus disrupting imperial policies.
I was previously a Renfrew Fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, working on a project on imperial frontiers in which I compared the Punic-Roman Western Mediterranean, medieval Ethiopia, and early modern Chile. I was also a Fellow of Churchill College, and a Research Associate at St John’s College beforehand.
In April-June 2019, I delved deeper into colonial Chile as a José Amor y Vázquez Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library (Brown University, US), where I also co-curated the exhibition ‘Gateway to a New World’ on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the Magellan-El Cano circumnavigation, the first voyage around the world.
US
I was previously a research associate for an ERC project (PROCON) focusing on ancient textiles (2016-2018). Before coming to Cambridge, I was a Project Officer at the Research Executive Agency of the European Commission (2015).
During my doctoral studies, in which I worked on the Phoenician and Greek colonisation in the ancient Mediterranean, I was invited as visiting graduate student at Brown University (Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology), the Spanish School for History and Archaeology in Rome, and Glasgow University (Department of Archaeology).
Egypt
Prior to my PhD, I lived and studied for six months in Cairo, Egypt, where I developed my interest in the longue durée history of Mediterranean encounters and Orientalist narratives. It was also in Cairo when I started my journey of provincializing Europe.