Diana Berruezo-Sánchez is an ICREA Research Professor at the UAB since Nov 2024 and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, where she held full-time positions as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and Career Development Fellow of Balliol College, as well as a Lecturer at the Faculty of Modern Languages replacing the Chair of Spanish. She conducts an innovative line of research on the experiences of Black women and men, and their spaces for poetic and cultural negotiation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain. She has secured international funding through highly competitive and prestigious fellowships and grants from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, the Newberry Library, the John Fell Fund, the Leverhulme Trust, and Balliol College. In 2022, she was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant to explore the cultural history of the Black African diaspora in Early Modern Spain.
Research interests
Currently, her projects aim to develop a new scholarly framework to reassess Europe’s past and its peoples, narrating the previously untold stories of cultural heritage created by Black singers, dancers, poets, and actors. With a focus on Spain and the broader Iberian world, her research promotes an understanding of survival through creativity, the construction of Blackness, and identity formation processes in the early modern period. She also leads interdisciplinary groups that explore Black diasporas through the lenses of History, Musicology, Literature, and Anthropology, contributing to the growing field of diaspora studies and bringing new perspectives on cultural exchange and diversity in early modern Europe. She previously specialized on early modern Spanish literature and cross-cultural influences, exploring how texts circulate across borders to form networks crucial to understanding literary traditions.
Selected research activities
Publications priro to her ICREA appointment:
- Author of Black Voices in Early Modern Spanish Literature, 1500-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024)
- Co-editor of Iberia negra. Textos para otra historia de la diáspora africana (siglos XVI y XVII), with Manuel Olmedo Gobante and Cornesha Tweede (London: Routledge, 2024)
- Berruezo-Sánchez, D ‘De la invisibilidad a la especulación crítica: un negro esgrimista y poeta en el inédito Entremés segundo del negro,’ Bulletin of the Comediantes, 74, 1–2 (2024), 151–175.
- Berruezo-Sánchez, D ‘La creatividad negra: una facultad humana al servicio del empoderamiento afroibérico (siglos XVI y XVII)’, Personas afrodescendientes en la Península Ibérica ayer y hoy: proyecciones y posicionamientos en la literatura, el arte y los medios, ed. Julia Borst and Danae Gallo (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2024), 131–143.
- Berruezo-Sánchez, D ‘Prácticas de aprendizaje y alfabetización en La negra lectora’, Iberia negra (London: Routledge),137–154.
- Berruezo-Sánchez, D ‘Leonor Rica y Dominguilla: Mujeres negras emprendedoras’, in Esclavas, horras y no blancas nacidas libres en los mundos ibéricos: actuación, movilidad y memorias. Siglos XVI–XIX, ed. R. Pérez, M. Fernández and E. Corona (U Sevilla), 227–239.
Projects and Grants
- PI of an ERC Consolidator Grant, The Cultural History of the Black African Diaspra in Early Modern Spain (BADEMS), starting in June 2024
- Long-Term Fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago to pursue my research project Linguistic Blackness: Identity and Multilingual Practices in Early Modern Iberia (1500–1700) (Sept 2023-May 2024)
- PI of the MICINN/AEI-funded research project, The Making of Blackness (Sept 2021-Sept 2025)
- PI of externally funded seminar by Fundación Duques de Soria to organize the seminar The Construction of Blackness: Circulation Processes in Early Modernity (3–5 July 2024)
Research Panels
- Coordinator of the FLA panel at the AEI since Jan 2024.