Bethan Fisk

Biography

My dissertation explores African diasporic religious ways of knowing at the height of trans-Atlantic slavery, the Bourbon reforms, and the Enlightenment. Utilizing largely unused ecclesiastical records, governmental correspondence, civil and criminal trial documentation from fourteen archival and manuscript collections across Colombia, Spain, and the United States, I engage in a material culture analysis of the social worlds that constituted diasporic religion and how epistemologies of the sacred circulated within them. My dissertation analyzes the diverse everyday practices of people of African descent and argues that the relationship between them was a shared world, one created by the structures of power of Catholicism, the law, and slavery. I illustrate how while eighteenth-century New Granada was a single colony, it was simultaneously a transnational space that was a microcosm of events that occurred across the Iberian Atlantic. My dissertation explores African diasporic religious ways of knowing at the height of trans-Atlantic slavery, the Bourbon reforms, and the Enlightenment. Utilizing largely unused ecclesiastical records, governmental correspondence, civil and criminal trial documentation from fourteen archival and manuscript collections across Colombia, Spain, and the United States, I engage in a material culture analysis of the social worlds that constituted diasporic religion and how epistemologies of the sacred circulated within them. My dissertation analyzes the diverse everyday practices of people of African descent and argues that the relationship between them was a shared world, one created by the structures of power of Catholicism, the law, and slavery. I illustrate how while eighteenth-century New Granada was a single colony, it was simultaneously a transnational space that was a microcosm of events that occurred across the Iberian Atlantic.

Research Interest

History