Professor Jorge Flores - TORCH International Fellow in the Faculty of History (May 2022)

19 April 2022

The Faculty of History is pleased to announce that Professor Jorge Flores (University of Lisbon) has been awarded a TORCH International Fellowship in Oxford for May 2022.

The history of Iberian empires has long been understood through the lens of the conquest and colonisation of the Americas. In line with the growing recognition of the centrality of Asia in early modern global history, recent scholarship has increasingly focused on the parallel presence of Spaniards and Portuguese in Persia, India, the Malay Peninsula, South China, and the Philippines. 

Professor Flores will bring his unique expertise on the history of empire, cross-cultural interaction, and knowledge production in early modern Iberian Asia to Oxford. A distinguished practitioner of global history, Flores is a truly interdisciplinary scholar working with archival, literary, and visual materials. His presence will encourage a conversation within Oxford about the importance of decentring the Atlantic world and rethinking Iberian exploration by recovering Asian perspectives on the trajectories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. In particular, he will work with Professor Giuseppe Marcocci, whose work intersects with that of Professor Flores in various ways, and who will act as his host during the Visiting Fellowship.

Professor Flores will be involved in a rich programme of events:

For more information, please consult: https://iberianhistory.web.ox.ac.uk/      

Professor Jorge Flores

About Professor Flores

Jorge Flores is Coordinator Researcher at the Interuniversity Centre for the History of Science and Technology and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science of the University of Lisbon. He previously held academic position at the European University Institute in Florence (2010-2019); Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island (2004-2010); and the University of Macau (1989-1994). This academic itinerance has proved crucial with regards to personal growth, but also to his education as a global history practitioner and a scholar, who specialises in the social and cultural history of the early modern Portuguese empire in Asia, with a special focus on Mughal India, Sri Lanka, and the Malay Peninsula. 

His work engages with several themes such as empire, diplomacy, cultural interaction, and gender. Among Jorge’s recent publications are the books Unwanted Neighbors: The Mughals, the Portuguese, and Their Frontier Zones (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Mughal Padshah: A Jesuit Treatise on Emperor Jahangir’s Court and Household (Brill, 2016). He is currently completing a new monograph tentatively titled ‘The Accidental Persianate State: Political Communication between the Estado da Índia and Mughal India’.