Stephanie Hassell - Territorial Identities: Slavery and Religious Landscapes in the Portuguese Empire in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century India

The Special Wednesday Colloquium/Brown-Bag Seminar will take place October 21 at noon-1:30 in Carr 229.  Our presenter is Stephanie Hassell who is a postdoctoral associate in the Duke History Department.  Professor Bruce Hall will serve as a discussant.

Stephanie’s paper explores the early modern Portuguese world in which imperial claims upon space shaped religious landscapes.  She analyzes Goan Inquisition records to explore slave flight in the context of overlapping political and religious spatial boundaries in Portuguese India.  She examines the 1595 inquisition trials of an Abyssinian slave named Gabriel Abexim, who lived as a Catholic in Portuguese India and as a Muslim in the sultanate of Ahmadnagar.  On the surface, inquisitors’ logic of a territorial religious identity fit Gabriel’s experiences perfectly; however, his case also revealed fissures in their logic.  His case exposes Portuguese anxieties about identity, conversion, religious territoriality and jurisdiction.

Stephanie Hassell is a postdoctoral associate in the History Department.  She is trained in African history and received her PhD from Stanford University in 2014.  Her dissertation research was funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).  Last month her article, “Inquisition Records from Goa as Sources for the Study of Slavery in the Eastern Domains of the Portuguese Empire,” was published in History in Africa.  

Bruce S. Hall is an associate professor in the department of history at Duke University. His research has focused on the intellectual and social history of Muslim West Africa. Professor Hall’s work is deeply engaged in broad questions of history and theory. His first book, A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), was the co-winner of the AHA’s Martin A. Klein Prize for best book in African history. He is currently working on a second book project entitled Bonds of Trade: Slavery and Commerce in the 19^th-century Circum-Sahara, which is about a trans-Saharan commercial network that operated between Libya and Mali.