Celine Dauverd

Professor Dauverd teaches courses about the history of ancient and pre-modern Europe including "Early Modern Societies: Italy and Spain" "Mediterranean History, 600-1600," "Venice and Florence in the Renaissance," "Witchcraft and Magic," "The Cosmos in the Ancient Mediterranean," "Medieval Spain and Portugal," and “Gladiators and Prostitutes in Ancient Rome.” At the graduate level, she teaches seminars on Early Modern European cultural history and Mediterranean History.     

Professor Dauverd received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the socio-cultural relations between Iberia, Italy, and North Africa in late medieval-premodern times (1400-1600). Her first book, Imperial Ambition in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Genoese Merchants and the Spanish Crown (Cambridge University Press, NY 2015) examines the role of the Genoese trade diaspora in southern Italy in the context of the Spanish-Habsburg expansion in the Mediterranean Sea. Her second book, Church and State in Spanish Italy: Rituals and Political Legitimacy (Cambridge University Press, NY 2020) won the Eugene V. Kayden Book Award. It investigates the link between imperialism and religion through an analysis of the Spanish viceroys’ role in religious processions in Early Modern Naples. Dauverd’s third manuscript, Colonialism and Resistance in Early Modern Europe: Rebellion, Magic, and Reason in the Italian States, 1530-1760 (under peer review by Cambridge) explores Corsican resistance to Genoese colonialism in the context of the religious wars between Spain and Türkiye. Her current book project, All the Kings of the Mediterranean: Iberian Kings, Renaissance Popes, and Maghrebi Shariffs during the North African Conquests 1450-1630, assesses relations between Muslim and Christian rulers through the prism of the popes’ pursuit of imperial power.

Dauverd is a recipient of fellowships from the Casa de Velázquez Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies, the Center for Humanities and the Arts at CU Boulder, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers in Istanbul, Rome and Tangiers, the European University Institute in Florence, the Francis Weber and Andrew Mellon Foundation at the Huntington Library, the Humanities Research Institute at the University of California Irvine, the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University in New York, and I Tatti Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence.

In recent years she has received Visiting Professorships from the Historisches Kolleg in Munich, the Sapienza Università di Roma, and the Università di Pisa. She is spending the 2024-25 academic year on sabbatical leave in Málaga researching for a new book project entitled Cross-confessional Málaga: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim interaction through Resistance and Reconstruction, 1487-1609.

Professor Dauverd is accepting both M.A. and Ph.D. students. 
Recent graduates have worked on Renaissance Italian map making, women and gender in medieval Spain, medieval race relations in Spain, visual rituals in France and England, Portuguese Sephardi in the Netherlands, medieval Spanish cookbooks, and French religious wars. Current graduate students work on culture and religion in premodern Europe.