Dr Karoline (Kaja) Cook

Dr Karoline (Kaja) Cook - Lecturer in History of the Atlantic World

I am a social and cultural historian of the Iberian Atlantic, and my research analyses the interconnections between the Mediterranean and the Americas during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Specifically, I am interested in how Muslim-Christian relations in the western Mediterranean influenced social transformations and relationships in colonial Spanish America. My research and teaching engage with issues of religious identity, migration, mobility, empire, and emerging ideas about race in the early modern period.

My first book, Forbidden Passages: Muslims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) examined how Spanish converts from Islam who were labeled ‘Moriscos’ defied prohibitions on their emigration and settled in the Caribbean and South America. By writing a history of Moriscos and the Spanish Empire, I explored many issues that continue to resonate today: concerns with citizenship and belonging, anxieties about immigration, and the impact that Islamophobia and racism had on peoples’ daily lives. 

My current book project continues to explore these interests in religious identity and constructions of race during the early modern period, by examining how families who claimed descent from the Inca rulers of Peru, the Aztec rulers of Mexico, and the Nasrid emirs of Granada sought to acquire noble status and secure rights to their ancestral lands in the form of entailed estates. The success of some families in securing noble status rested on actions taken over the course of multiple generations that included strategic marriages, ties of godparentage and patronage, and military service to the Crown. The strategies used by petitioners who claimed descent from the Inca and Aztec rulers to acquire noble status show striking parallels to those adopted by the Morisco nobility in Granada. One aim of this project is to trace how knowledge of such strategies circulated among Indigenous and Morisco families both at the royal court in Madrid and in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru.

Researching both of these projects has taken me to archives in Mexico, Peru, Chile, Spain and Portugal.

My teaching interests are connected to the questions that are central to my research. Prior to Royal Holloway, I taught courses in Latin American history, Atlantic history, and global history at the University of Southern California, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Washington State University. In my current position, I contribute to the early modern course offerings, including a survey course on “Spanish and Portuguese Empires in the Americas, 1450-1650,” and a further subject course, “Entangled Histories: The Interconnected Atlantic World.”

I am currently a member of the editorial board of the Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies. I have held postdoctoral fellowships at the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. In Spring 2020 I was a Visiting Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford.

More information about my research is available via PURE. 

Email - karoline.cook@rhul.ac.uk