Advisors
José Manuel Malhão Pereira, retired Portuguese naval officer, holds a PhD in History and Philosophy of Sciences. He is member of the Interuniversity Center for the History of Science and Technology, of Academia de Marinha (a cultural institution of the Portuguese Navy), of Academia Portuguesa da História, of Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa, of Sociedade Histórica da Independência de Portugal, of International Association of Maritime Studies of the Turkish Piri Reis University, of Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities, de Tellichery, Índia, among other institutions. His areas of research and study are the History of High-Seas Navigation of the Portuguese and of the other maritime nations, and the evolution of nautical science. Has lectured in Portugal and abroad, and published extensively about the subject of his areas of research.
Rui Loureiro holds a PhD in History from the University of Lisbon (1995). He is currently a professor at the Instituto Superior Manuel Teixeira Gomes in Portimão, and a researcher at CHAM – Centro de Humanidades, at Universidade Nova de Lisboa; he is also a member of the Academia de Marinha, an academic institution of the Portuguese Navy. He specializes in the history of Iberian expansion in the 16th and 17th centuries, with a special focus on cultural themes. His most recent publications include a new edition of the Suma Oriental by Tomé Pires (CCCM, 2017) and the catalogue Em demanda da biblioteca de Fernão de Magalhães (BNP, 2019).
Amélia Polónia is a professor at the Department of History, Political and International Studies of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto, and the scientific coordinator of the CITCEM Research Centre (Centro Transdisciplinar Cultura, Espaço e Memória). Her main research areas include the history of Portuguese overseas expansion and European colonisation in the Early Modern Era. Seaports history, migrations, informal mechanisms of empire building, women as brokers and go-betweens and the environmental implications of European colonization are key-subjects of Polónia’s current research interests.
Filipe Castro is the Frederick Mayer II Professor of Maritime Archaeology in the Nautical Archaeology Program, at Texas A&M University, and the director of the J. Richard Steffy Ship Reconstruction Laboratory. He is a member of the Portuguese Academia de Marinha and his research interest is early modern European seafaring, and the history of wooden shipbuilding. He is the author of the books A Nau de Portugal (2003) and the Pepper Wreck, A Portuguese Indiaman at the Mouth of the Tagus River (2005), and the editor of Edge of Empire, Proceedings of the Symposium held at 2006 SHA Annual Meeting (2008), with Katie Custer, and ACUA Underwater Archaeology Proceedings of the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology (2011), with Lindsey Thomas.
Isabel Soler has a PhD in Romance Philology from the University of Barcelona (2000), where she teaches Portuguese literature and culture. She collaborates with the CESIC Institute of History, where she has participated in various research projects on the history of science in the 16th and 17th centuries. Her latest publications are: El sueño del rey: viajes y mesianismo en el Renacimiento peninsular (2015); Miguel de Cervantes: los años de Argel (2016) and Francisco de Holanda, Diálogos de Roma (ed. and trans.) (2018).
Ricardo Padrón holds a PhD in Romance languages and Literatures from Harvard University (1997) and is currently an Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia. He is also on the advisory board of the Renaissance Society of America. His research examines the relationship between mapping and writing in the formation of early modern geopolitical imaginaries. His first book, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature and Empire in Early Modern Spain (Chicago 2004) dealt with the Atlantic context, and his forthcoming book, The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West (Chicago 2020) deals with the Pacific. He is also the editor, along with Christina Lee of Princeton University, of The Spanish Pacific: A Reader of Primary Sources in English Translation (Amsterdam UP 2020).
Javier Ordóñez holds a PHD in Philosophy (1977) from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. He is currently Emeritus Professor of History of Science in the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid. His main research areas include the history of contemporary astronomy, the study of the birth of new scientific disciplines, especially astrophysics, and analysis of the relationship between wars and sciences. His current research focuses on the relationship between artisanal knowledge and the creation of scientific standards.
Dionisius A. Agius is a Fellow of the British Academy and Al-Qasimi Professor of Arabic Studies and Islamic Material Culture at the University of Exeter and affiliated to King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah. Educated at the Jesuit Université St-Joseph, Beirut and University of Toronto, he is an Arabist, ethnographer and linguist working on the maritime cultural landscapes of the Western Indian Ocean. He is author of: Seafaring in the Arabian Gulf and Oman: People of the Dhow (Kegan Paul 2005), winner of The Abdullah AL-Mubarak Al-Sabah Foundation and British-Kuwait Friendship Society major Book Prize; In the Wake of the Dhow: The Arabian Gulf and Oman (Ithaca 2010); Classic Ships of Islam: From Mesopotamia to the Indian Ocean (Brill 2014) and, most recently, The Life of the Red Sea Dhow: A Cultural History of Seaborne Exploration in the Islamic World (IB Tauris 2019).
Margaret Schotte holds a PhD in the history of science from Princeton University (2014). She is an associate professor of history at York University in Toronto, Canada, where she teaches on the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, and history of the book. Her prize-winning first book, Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800 (Johns Hopkins, 2019), is a comparative study of maritime expertise and training, with particular attention to the connections between classrooms, textbooks, and tacit knowledge. She has published on nautical instruments, logbooks, and navigational examinations. Her current research explores questions of technical knowledge, labour, and race in the French Compagnie des Indes. She is a councillor of Canadian Nautical Research Society and the Navy Records Society (UK).