Diana Berruezo-Sánchez (ADHUC-Universitat de Barcelona and University of Oxford) has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for her project The Cultural History of the Black African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (BADEMS) to study the cultural heritage of the Black diaspora in the sixteenth and seventeenth century Iberia. This is an interdisciplinary project that connects Cultural History, Literature, Linguistics, and Black Studies. It will narrate an untold story of both the tangible and intangible cultural legacy that Black Africans created, primarily but not exclusively as singers, dancers, actors, and storytellers. BADEMS will build a unique open-access archive and produce an interdisciplinary narrative about the contributions of Black women and men to the literary, and linguistic culture of Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The project is funded with 1.77 million euros.
Diana Berruezo-Sánchez, researcher with various grants and awards, has published an article on the presence of black poets in the early modern period («"Negro poeta debió de ser lo que tan negro romance hizo": ¿poetas negros en el ¿Siglo de Oro?», Hipogrifo, 2021) and her forthcoming monograph, The Afro-Hispanic Literary Legacy in Early Modern Spain, explores the contributions of Black women and men to the period's literary and cultural milieu, such as "vilancets de negre", literary disputes, music and religious festivals. She is currently the PI of The Making of Blackness: A Process of Cultural and Social Negotiation from the Bottom Up, an interdisciplinary network of scholars that has produced research workshops on the Black African agency. She is currently co-editing the volumne Iberia negra. Textos para otra historia de la diáspora africana (siglos XVI y XVII) (Routledge, 2023).
Imatge: (c) Xènia Fuentes/Universitat de Barcelona
