Organizers
Pedro Machado is Associate Professor of History, Indiana University, and a global and Indian Ocean historian with interests in commodity histories, labor and migratory movements, and the social, cultural, environmental and commercial trajectories of objects. He is the author of several works, among which are Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2014); Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); and Pearls, People and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds (Ohio University Press, 2020). He is currently at work on a global history of pearling and shell collection and exchange while also developing research on eucalyptus and colonial forestry in the Portuguese empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Olimpia E. Rosenthal is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Indiana University. Her main research areas include colonial Latin American cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and visual culture. Her first book, Race, Sex and Segregation in Colonial Latin America (Routledge 2022), examines the emergence and early development of indigenous segregationist policies in Spanish and Portuguese America. The book shows that segregationist measures influenced the material reorganization of space, shaped colonial processes of racialization, and contributed to the politicization of reproductive sex. Her work has also been published in journals from various countries, and she has organized a series of international conferences, including one on subaltern studies at Indiana University’s Gateway Center in India.