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Dr Bert Carlstrom

Bert

Associate Lecturer in Medieval Mediterranean

Email: b.w.carlstrom@qmul.ac.uk
Room Number: Arts Two 2.06

Profile

My research focuses on religion, identity, and cultural interaction in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Iberian world. I am particularly interested in the co-production of religious identity that occurs through interaction – both the ongoing conversation between Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, and the Mediterranean encounters with the Atlantic and American worlds. I seek to approach history from the margins, seeking to understand the process of marginalisation and the lived experiences of marginalised Early Modern peoples.

 

I contribute to modules in both Islamic History and European History, ranging in chronology from the rise of Islam to the Haitian revolution. I also teach blocks on the MA programme and am happy to supervise PhD research on any aspect of Late Medieval and Early modern culture and identity.

 

Research

Research Interests:

My PhD, which I am currently editing as a monograph, examined the treatment of coercively baptised Jews and Muslims in late medieval Spain, focusing in particular on the career of Hernando de Talavera, the confessor to Queen Isabel of Castile. Talavera advocated for the assimilation of Conversos (converted Jews) and later developed new evangelisation strategies toward Moriscos (converted Muslims) in the Kingdom of Granada. I examine the pastoral treatment of Converso and Moriscos through the lenses of religious co-production, racialisation, and respectability politics, arguing that the attempts to incorporate New Christians into Castilian Christianity reshaped the definitions of Christianity itself. My developing research also seeks to incorporate the experiences of the peoples of the Canary Islands and Caribbean.

In addition, I am pursuing two strands of inquiry related to history teaching and learning. First. I am exploring the role of reflection in history learning. What effect does teaching reflective practice have in the undergraduate classroom? I am particularly interested in questions of perspectivism, reflexivity, and subjectivity. My second strand of inquiry brings together my historical and pedagogical interests, as I seek to explore and articulate the potential of history learning as an intervention in the present through the development of teaching resources on Late Medieval and Early Modern cultural encounters.

 

Publications

“‘Induced to conform…to the conduct of Christians’: Pastoral Instruction and the Moriscos of Granada,” in Medieval Matters: Europe’s Premodern Religious Cultures in Honour of Miri Rubin (Brill, forthcoming)

‘Co-producing Religion: the Christian Use of Judaism in 15th Century Iberia’, in Moving in the Wrong Circles: Circulation of Religious Dissent, Antiheretical and Anticonverso Discourses in Premodern Europe (12th-17th c.) (Routledge, forthcoming)

Supervision

  • Late Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World
  • Cultural and religious interaction
  • Conversos and/or Moriscos
  • Minorities in the Iberian World
  • The teaching of premodern history

(co-supervised with Miri Rubin) Ana Roda Sanchez, Racialisation and social segregation of Jewish converts (conversos) in late medieval Iberia.

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