Our work has developed along several interconnected lines.
1. We have studied women’s engagement with a global world as cultural mediators in a variety of spaces and activities, from travelers (real and vicarious) and translators to members of diplomatic circles or epistolary networks, in our book Gender and Cultural Mediation in the Long Eighteenth-Century (2024)
2. Our Open Access database ‘Writing for Women’ (W4W) is the one to systematically explore women’s role in the emergence of modern reading publics. Focusing on printed and manuscript works produced in Spain, Portugal and colonial Spanish America and Portugal in the eighteenth century, it sets up a transnational and transatlantic research model to be replicated for other contexts and periods.
3. Our research has questioned dichotomies between centres and peripheries of Enlightenment and modernity. The essay-collection European Modernity and the Passionate South (2023) studies the cultural, gendered construction of the “South” in the context of nation-building processes in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Italy and Spain, problematizing the single narrative of Orientalization dominant in current approaches.
4. We have demonstrated that sensibility (involving sensations, emotions, and moral and aesthetic judgement) was at the heart of Enlightenment’s controversial universalism and worked as a mechanism for naturalizing normative models while, paradoxically, it also justified transgressions. Our book Histories of Sensibilities. Visions of Gender, Race, and Emotions in the Global Enlightenment (2024) departs from too abstract perspectives by stressing how sensibilities were performed. It also probes their dark side by exploring the class, gender and racial bias embedded in standards of sexual freedom, and the ambivalences of the sentimental ideal when confronted with race and slavery.
The outcomes of the project go well beyond our initial expectations and have been widely disseminated through different means and languages to both academic and non-academic publics, achieving a considerable societal impact. Our collective publications include three essay-collections and six special issues in prestigious academic journals, as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. The international conferences Southern Passions (2020) and Gender, Modernities and the Global Enlightenment (2022) and our seminar series have fostered discussion among leading scholars from different continents, disciplines and fields. We have also addressed teachers both at university and secondary education through teacher-training seminars and a workshop on outreach including a dramatized presentation of research materials. Finally, we have aimed at general publics via popularised publications, talks, podcasts, interviews and social media.
