Stephanie Cavanaugh

Stephanie M. Cavanaugh is a historian of the early modern era. Her research focuses on conversion and identity-making in the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Spanish empire. She teaches a wide range of topics in premodern European and world histories.

Dr. Cavanaugh researched and taught at the University of Oxford from 2019 to 2023, where she was the Sir John Elliot Junior Research Fellow in Spanish History (1400-1900) at Exeter College and co-organized Oxford's Iberian History Seminar. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Early Modern Conversions project at McGill University from 2016 to 2018. She holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Toronto (2016), an MA in History from the University of Toronto (2008) and a BA (History Honours, English Honours, Spanish Minor) from the University of New Brunswick (2006).

Dr. Cavanaugh's first book is Morisco Conversions: Belonging, Status, and Legal Action in Early Modern Valladolid (forthcoming). Moriscos were Iberian Muslims baptized into Catholicism (largely under coercion) and their descendants.

The Spanish Crown and Church attempted to fully convert the Moriscos throughout the sixteenth century, subjecting them to Inquisitorial investigation and prosecution, registration and surveillance, deportation, prohibitions on their mobility and a host of policies aiming to control and assimilate them.

Dr. Cavanaugh's book examines how Moriscos responded with legal action in defense of their families, communities, and properties, using the textual record they generated through petitioning and litigation. These records reveal that Morisco status was malleable and multiform, exposing the constructed nature of identities and boundaries of belonging in early modern Spain. Morisco Conversions questions the historical conditions under which people are accepted or rejected as neighbours, congregants and citizens. It joins ongoing investigations into how subjects used legal systems to their advantage in a developing imperial order, including an increasing number of peoples conquered, colonized and converted to Catholicism in the global Spanish empire.

The expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain in 1609-1614 was justified with Islamophobic arguments depicting them as inherently incompatible with Catholic society because of their Muslim bloodlines. Dr. Cavanaugh's second book project asks how shifting ideas about blood purity, religious difference and foreignness were employed in the formation of racialized categories of difference in the early modern era. This project, Descendants of Converts: Race, Religion, and the Moriscos in the Early Modern Spanish World, traces and contextualizes ideas about race in reference to Moriscos, exploring early modern ideas about family, children, lineage and the gendered terms of descent.

Listen to Dr. Cavanaugh discuss her research on Not Just the Tudors, podcast episode "Enslaved Children in 16th Century Spain".

Publications

"Chapter 4: Moriscos" The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Inquisition, ed. Lu Ann Homza. Cambridge University Press, in progress.

"Litigating for Liberty: enslaved Morisco children in sixteenth-century Valladolid," Renaissance Quarterly 70, no.4 (Winter 2017): 1282-1320.

"In Defense of Community: Morisca Women in Sixteenth-Century Valladolid," Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, eds. Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Alexandra Guerson and Dana Wessell Lightfoot. University of Nebraska Press, 2020.

"Serán Siempre Moros? Assessing Conversion During the Expulsion of the Moriscos," The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond. Volume 4: Resistance and Reform, ed. Kevin Ingram. Brill, 2020.

Dr. Cavanaugh has published book reviews in Renaissance Quarterly, BBC History Magazine, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, Journal of Jesuit Studies, and Literary Review of Canada Online.

Teaching

• HIST 1001: Past into Present (Module: Histories of Resistance)
• HIST 3001: West Meets East, 1050-1600