Pablo F. Gomez F'09

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/ACLS Early Career Fellowship Program Dissertation Completion Fellowships 2009
Department: History
Vanderbilt University
Bodies of Encounter: African and European Health Practices in the Early Modern Nuevo Reino de Granada

This project explores the encounter of African and European health practices and ideas about the body and disease in the early modern Iberian Atlantic world. Through an interdisciplinary approach, it contextualizes and defines local and transatlantic connections between African and European cultures in the Americas. Drawing on material culture and documentary evidence from early modern Africa, Europe, and Spanish America, this project contributes to diverse understudied fields. It breaks ground by bringing to the front African practices and systems of belief as seminal in the emergence of early modern ideas abound body and health, and by challenging prevailing assumptions about the place occupied by Africans and Europeans in processes of cultural interchange in the New World.