Dr Chloe Ireton

On research leave: 2023/24 & 2024/25

Chloe Ireton is a Lecturer in the History of Iberia and the Iberian World 1500-1800 and a British Academy Wolfson Fellow (2023-2026), whose research and teaching interests span the histories of slavery, freedom, empire, and subalturn public spheres in the early southern Atlantic world, as well as methods and theories for writing histories ‘from below,’ in particular working across the fields of social, cultural, and intellectual history, and with forays into methods and theories in microhistory, historical geography, urban history, and comparative, entangled, and global histories. 

Chloe's first book, Slavery & Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic (Cambridge University Press, 2024) is an intellectual history exploring how free and enslaved Black people in the early Atlantic conceptualized and contested ideas about slavery and freedom. Weaving together thousands of archival fragments, this study explores a shared Black Atlantic world where the meanings of slavery and freedom were fiercely contested and claimed. It recreates the worlds of extraordinary individuals and communities in the long sixteenth century, whilst mapping the development of early modern Black thought about slavery and freedom. From a free Black mother’s embarkation license to cross the Atlantic Ocean, to an enslaved Sevillian woman’s epistles to her freed husband in New Spain, to an enslaved man's negotiations with prospective buyers on the auction block in Mexico City, to a Black man’s petition to reclaim his liberty after his illegitimate enslavement, the book explores how Africans and their descendants reckoned with laws and theological discourses that legitimized the enslavement of Black people and the varied meanings of freedom across legal jurisdictions. Their intellectual labor reimagined the epistemic worlds of slavery and freedom in the early modern Atlantic.

Chloe is currently conducting research for her second monograph, tentatively titled Infrastructures of Black Political Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic. The study is an intellectual history of Black political thought in the early modern era rooted in a social history archive and a spatial approach to histories of ideas and networks of political know-how. The project deploys methods in spatial analyses, urban history, social history, and connected histories to trace individuals and their ideas in particular milieus, while also accounting for how broader political ideas circulated between different sites in this period. 

Chloe is also currently writing Plotting for Freedom, a dual biography of an enslaved Black couple whose epic love story and various pursuits of liberty stretched across a vast canvas of the early modern Atlantic world spanning West Africa, Spain, and Mexico. This is a trade book that aims for broad public dissemination and engagement with her research.

Chloe's research has also appeared in the Hispanic American Historical Review, The European History Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, and Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, while her article “Black Africans’ Freedom Litigation Suits to Define Just War and Just Slavery in the Early Spanish Empire," which appeared in the Renaissance Quarterly in 2020, and was awarded the Renaissance Society of America William Nelson Prize for best article published in Renaissance Quarterly. She has also contributed chapters to edited collections published by Cambridge University Press, University of Pennsylvania Press, Editorial de Universidad de Sevilla, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Editorial.

PhD supervision

Chloe welcomes inquiries from prospective graduate students in the following areas: the history of Iberia and the Iberian world 1500-1800; colonial Latin American History; Atlantic History; early Caribbean history; pre-colonial West Africa and/or West-Central Africa and the Atlantic world; Africans and their descendants in the Atlantic world; intellectual history and histories of ideas; histories of gender, empire, and race 'from below'; new methodologies for histories of subaltern knowledge and thought, especially in Atlantic contexts; interdisciplinary and trans-regional approaches to Early Modern History; and cultural and social history.

Current students. I am currently second- or co-supervisor to the following students: José María Álvarez Hernández, 'Black African Political Thought and its Impact on British and Spanish Imperial Foreign Policy,' King's College London; Jorge Varela Yepes, 'Liberal thought in comparative perspective: the cases of Colombia and Chile, 1820-1880,' UCL HIistory.
 

Major publications

• Slavery & Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic (Cambridge University Press, 2024), ISBN: 9781009533461 
• "The Life and Legacy of Francisco Carreño: Practicing and Protecting Freedom Between the Canary Islands and New Spain in the Late Sixteenth Century," in Beyond 1619: The Atlantic Origins of American Slavery, edited by Paul Polgar, Marc Lerner, and Jesse Cromwell.  University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, PA, USA, 87-103. 
• 2021 “L’imaginaire éthiopien dans le premier monde hispanique: esclavage et baptême dans le Catéchisme évangélique de Sandoval,” Revue d'Histoire Moderne & Contemporaine, 68-2, avril-juin 2021, 102-128. 
• 2020 “Black Africans’ Freedom Litigation Suits to Define Just War and Just Slavery in the Early Spanish Empire," Renaissance Quarterly, 73(4), 1277-1319. Awarded the Renaissance Society of America William Nelson Prize for best article published in the Renaissance Quarterly in 2020.  
• 2020 “Margarita de Sossa, Sixteenth-Century Puebla de los Ángeles, New Spain (Mexico).” In As If She Were Free: A Collective Biography of Black Women and Emancipation in the Americas, edited by Erica L. Ball, Tatiana Seijas, and Terri L. Snyder, (Cambridge University Press, October 2020), 27-42. 
• 2017 ““They Are Blacks of the Caste of Black Christians”: Old Christian Black Blood in the Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Iberian Atlantic.” Hispanic American Historical Review, 97:4, 2017, 579-612. 

For a full list of publications, please see Chloe's Iris profile.

Grants and projects

Chloe has held several major research grants and fellowships. Chloe is currently a British Academy Wolfson Fellow (2023-2026) working on her project 'Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Modern Atlantic 1450-1750.' In the past, Chloe's research has also been supported by the following grants and funders: British Academy / Leverhulme Small Research Grant; Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación de España; John Carter Brown Library Helen Watson Bucker Memorial Fellowship; The Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Studentship; Social Science Research Council Andrew W. Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship SSRC-IDRF; American Historical Association Albert J. Beveridge Grant; The Huntington Library W. M. Keck Foundation Fellowship; Renaissance Society of America Research Grant; Conference on Latin American History. Chloe has also held institutional affiliations with the Departamento de Historia at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, the Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City, and the Área de Historia Moderna at the Universidad de Pablo Olavide in Sevilla. 

Media Appearances/Public Engagement

Chloe regularly engages the public about her research and teaching through public lectures, interviews, and historical consulting. In 2021, Chloe co-organized “Beyond Eurocentrism in Intellectual History, a colloquium,” with Professor Nicola Miller. In 2021, Chloe also worked on an interdisciplinary collaboration with John Beusterein and Sara Pink on antiracist pedagogy, culminating in their co-authorship of ‘Callejeando Sevilla histórica: Una caminata antirracista por la ciudad, [Walking the streets of historic Seville; an anti-racist walk through the city]” co-authored with John Beusterein and Sara Pink, in Hispania 104.1 (2021): pp. 332–42. Chloe also supports various Widening Participation initiatives, most recently co-leading the UCL History Undergraduate Induction Project with Dr. Patrick Lantschner. Chloe is also regularly involved in community education projects, and over the years has developed various in-community writing workshops (in both UK and Colombia) to help foster confidence in writing, literacy, and authorial voice, usually culminating in a collaborative community or individual writing project. Chloe also often mentors young adults from low-income and non-traditional backgrounds in further education, life skills, and employability.

Teaching

Broadly, Chloe's teaching explores the histories of African, Hispanic, and Lusophone Atlantic worlds between 1500 and 1800, and how people from these regions contributed to knowledge formation and histories of ideas in Europe and the Americas. Chloe's undergraduate and graduate teaching spans the fields of Iberian history, colonial Latin American history, Atlantic history, pre-colonial West Africa, and West Central Africa, and historical methods and theories. 

• Black Lives in the South Atlantic: West Africa, Americas, and the Caribbean in the early modern era. Undergraduate, Second-Year Research Seminar. Website here. 
• Black & Indigenous Thought in Imperial Contexts: Race, Gender, Religion, & Power in Latin America 1492-1750 (third-year undergraduate Special Subject seminar) (third-year Dissertation)
• Race, Identity and Empire in the Iberian Atlantic World (HIST0770) (second- and third-year undergraduate Advanced seminar, usually runs in Term 1)
• Thinking with the Caribbean, 1492-1700: Entangled Empires, and Interconnected Atlantic and Global Histories. [HIST0209] (second- and third-year undergraduate Advanced seminar, usually runs in Term 2)
• Atlantic History, 1450-1810 A: Entangled Atlantics (elective module for students on the MA History, usually runs in Term 1)
• Atlantic History, 1450-1810 B: Making Atlantic History, New Approaches to Atlantic History (elective module for students on the MA History, usually runs in Term 2)
• MA Core: Culture, Ideas and Identities (HIST0844)