Turin, 10-12 September 2025
The Summer School aims to explore the modern debates surrounding slavery and serfdom in Europe and the Americas within the timeframe
of the Early Modern period, defined here broadly as stretching from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth.
The project aims to encourage a comparative perspective, focussing on three key aspects: 1) Early Modern and Enlightenment debates ranging from race and ethnicity to the rights of man. Debates about enslavement begin with ethical, economic and theological questions, and evolve in the period towards a greater focus on race, ethnicity and discussion of the rights of man. How are notions of race debated in the period? 2) Serfdom and slavery. Serfdom existed widely across Europe in the Early Modern period. The challenges relating to research into serfdom in part mirror the challenges concerning enslavement, yet the two phenomena are almost always studied separately. To what extent are there parallels between serfdom and slavery? 3) The role of imaginative literature and the creative arts. Novels, stories, plays, operas, paintings and prints play an increasingly important role, in the Enlightenment period in particular, in exploring notions and constructions of otherness, and in creating often paradoxical fictions of enslavement.
SCIENTIFIC CO-ORDINATION: NICHOLAS CRONK
SPEAKERS
JUNIOR FELLOWS
PARTICIPANTS
Melania Acerbi is a scholar of Early Modern History. She holds a Master’s degree in Historical Sciences from the University of Florence (Università degli studi di Firenze) and she has also completed a postgraduate program in Italian and Latin Literature, Sociolinguistics, and Historical-Geographical disciplines. Her researches focuses on the cultural exchanges and mutual influences between Europe and the Americas, across the Atlantic, during the early modern period. Since 2017, she has been an active participant in the Permanent Seminar on Renaissance History organized by the SAGAS Department at the University of Florence. In addition to her academic work, she translates contemporary American poets (writing in both English and Spanish) and regularly contributes historical essays to various journals.
THP Summer School presentation | Revolutionary language and colonial law: Toussaint Louverture, the Haitian Revolution, and the transatlantic circulation of freedom discourses
Eduardo Angel Cruz (1995) is a Mexican historian specialising in Spanish colonial history. Early in his career, he studied financial disputes surrounding prominent Catholic pilgrimage sites, such as the Virgin of Guadalupe (Mexico City). Years of archival experience prompted an evolution of his pursuits towards broader devotional practices. This progression culminated in a PhD dissertation, currently in contract for publication with Routledge (in English) and with Florence University Press (in Spanish), which examines the economic dynamics underpinning the canonization of saints in Baroque Rome and the deployment of Counter-Reformation sanctity as political propaganda across multiple Spanish overseas territories. As a recently appointed FWO junior postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven, his focus is on analysing the concepts of ‘miracle’ and ‘miraculous cure,’ alongside the intersections of race and gender as reflected in testimonies by Indigenous and Afro-descendant witnesses of miraculous deeds across colonial Latin America.
THP Summer School presentation | The Saint’s Unknown Servants: Voices of Indigenous Servitude and African Enslavement in Colonial Miracle Records
Lorenzo Bonvicini is a PhD candidate in Early Modern history at the University of Turin. His research focuses on material life in prisons, with particular attention to prisoners’ graffiti. He also investigates the lives of individuals sentenced to forced labour in the Duchy of Este.
THP Summer School presentation | “Malevolent followers, armed with nothing but ignorance and stupidity”: Galley convicts and forced labourers in the Duchy of Modena in the Eighteenth Century
Miguel de Carvalho Adrião is born on September 14th, 1995, and he is a PhD candidate in the History, Anthropology, Religions program at the La Sapienza University of Rome. He obtained his Historical Studies’ degree from the Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil (2019), and went on to pursuit a Master’s’ Degree in History and Philosophy, this time at the Università degli studi di Siena, Italy (2024). His main interests are focused on the intellectual and cultural roots of the colonization of Latin America from the late 15th century onwards, as well as the broad field of cultural connections and exchanges that have taken place in that process. Currently, Mr. de Carvalho Adrião is conducting research on the Jesuit missionary sites of conversion established since the second half of the 16th century in Brazil, usually called aldeias or aldeamentos. Looking into the aldeias, whether it be from the perspective of the missionaries, or colonial power, or even Portuguese settlers, he expects to reach a better understanding of the origins of these settlements’ and the contradictions they unraveled within the Brazilian colonial society during late 16th century. His research is titled The matter of costumes: Inconstance and adaptation amidst the Jesuit aldeias in 16th century Brazil.
THP Summer School presentation | Freedom or salvation? The problem of the Jesuit aldeias in 16th century Brazil
Dr. Sandhya Devesan is an academic based in Delhi, India. She was L M Singhvi Fellow 2019 at the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, and worked with Prof. Simon Critchley at the ICSI, The New School, New York, in 2015 as Seminar Fellow. Her areas of interest are political philosophy, decoloniality, gender studies, environmental humanities, and literary theory. She teaches literature and theory, and is Director of the Women’s Studies Centre, at Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi, India.
THP Summer School presentation | Savage Forms: Aesthetic Regimes of Power in the Early Modern Colonial World
Ayu Puja Lestari is a postgraduate student pursuing a dual LLM in Islamic Law at SOAS University of London and in MA in Islamic Studies at Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia (UIII). Her research explores the intersections of Islamic law, gender, and human rights, with a current focus on classical legal constructions of concubinage and female service in Muslim societies. She seeks to contribute a Southeast Asian Muslim perspective to global debates on slavery, servitude, and legal subordination. Ayu is also the founder of the “Unwritten School” initiative, which mobilised educational equity efforts across 17 Indonesian provinces. She is an LPDP awardee and actively engages with feminist legal theory, decolonial approaches, and comparative legal traditions.
THP Summer School presentation | Gendered Subjugation in Islamic Legal Thought: Parallels Between Female Servitude and Early Modern Serfdom
Stanislav Mohylnyi earned his M.A. in Comparative History from Central European University (Budapest) in 2018. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies. His research interests include global and Russian intellectual history of serfdom and slavery, Russian serfdom, and the 18th-century social history of Ukraine.
THP Summer School presentation | Slavery and Serfdom: Contested Concepts in Eighteenth-Century Russia and Europe
Kimberly Nicholson is a DPhil student at the University of Oxford, reading Global & Imperial History, and a recipient of the University of Oxford’s highly competitive Academic Futures Scholarship. Prior to starting her DPhil, she completed an MA in History of Art. Her MA dissertation re-examined the visual and literary culture of abolitionism. She deployed psychoanalytic, aesthetic and critical theory as well as elements of post-colonial, literary and film theory to ultimately argue that a range of abolitionist-era representations of slavery were pornographically exploitative in nature. Her DPhil thesis builds on the themes of her MA dissertation. She is particularly interested in exploring the anti-slavery movement’s relationship to scientific racism, national identity and empire building; how abolitionist materials might have reinscribed racial constructs of black sexuality and commodified the enslaved body; and how the movement’s use of sentimental tropes may have served to sexualise representations of the enslaved in pain.
THP Summer School presentation | Mistress of the Lash: The Erotics of White Womanhood and Violence in the Slaveholding West Indies
Alison Posey is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Romance Studies at Duke University, where she examines cultural production among minority groups in contemporary Spain. Her research, featured in leading journals like Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies and Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, directly informs her teaching on race, identity, and belonging across the Hispanophone world. Her forthcoming books, Writing Against Death: Autobiographic Lives in Afrodiasporic Spain, and Democracia en declive: Conversaciones ecuatoguineanas are under contract with Liverpool UP and Editoriales Verbum, respectively.
THP Summer School presentation | Writing African enslavement and (post)colonialism in contemporary narratives of migration to Spain
Andrew Russo is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Tübingen. He received his PhD in History from the University of Rochester in 2024. His research focuses on religious encounter, migration, and identity in the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean, with particular emphasis on the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa. His current book project, based on research conducted in Morocco, Tunisia, and Spain, traces the aftermath of the 1609 Morisco Expulsion and examines how diasporic communities in North Africa negotiated belonging and belief through memory work and educational practices. His articles have appeared in Viator and The Journal of the Middle East and Africa, and he has presented widely on the history of early modern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Islamic world.
THP Summer School presentation | Enslavable or Redeemable: The Racialized Logic of Redemption and Ransom in the Early Modern Mediterranean
Cecilia Sensi grew up in Turin. The topic of the construction of identity and the cultural discourse around it has always been at the center of her academic interests. She obtained a first Master’s degree in Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Turin with a thesis centered on Gothic identity under the rule of King Theodoric. She then spent two years teaching Latin and Italian literature in Italian high schools. After a period of research in Paris, on 3 April 2025 she obtained a second Master’s degree in Modern History at the University of Turin with a thesis on vulnerability and gender performance in Maximilien Robespierre’s production. Her current areas of research include the history of gender identity and performance, the history of the body and the history of vulnerability in the late modern era.
THP Summer School presentation | “Only Fit for a Seraglio”: Harem Imagery and Female Agency in the Long Eighteenth Century
THP Summer School presentation | Free to Work: The Figure of the Citizen-Worker in French Colonial Discourse, 1817-1833
Palazzo d’Azeglio
Via Principe Amedeo 34 – Torino
Palazzo d’Azeglio is a historic building located in the centre of Turin, it has been the headquarters of the Turin Humanities Programme – THP – of Fondazione 1563 since 2021. Its history began in 1679, when it was built as part of the second expansion of the city. It was the residence of local noble families, including the Taparelli d’Azeglio, hence the name. Since 1970 it has housed the Luigi Einaudi Foundation, a national point of reference for the social sciences. The interiors and the decorations of the building feature a variety of architectural and decorative styles, which are the result of several refurbishments due to the various owners who have alternated over the course of more than three centuries.
Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi
via G. Mazzini, 11 – Torino
The Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi of Turin was founded in 1936 and is one of the most prestigious institutions of higher education in art, music and dance in Italy. Illustrious musicians and composers of the past trained here. The Conservatorio offers academic courses and PhDs. It also carries out artistic production activities and it participates in music festivals organized by local institutions.
