Assistant Professor Fernanda Bretones Lane (Ph.D. Vanderbilt University, 2019) is a historian of the colonial Caribbean, Afro-Latin America, and the Atlantic World. A native of Brazil, she earned a Master’s degree from South America’s preeminent Program in Social History at the University of São Paulo (2013), and she has also held fellowships in Spain (Universitat Jaume I de Castellón) and Germany (Max Planck Institute for European Legal History).
Bretones Lane is at work on a book manuscript that examines Spain’s religious sanctuary policy—a legislation by which black fugitives from foreign colonies could hope to receive asylum and freedom in Spanish territories if they converted to Catholicism. This policy simultaneously served Spain’s long-standing religious mission to evangelize the non-Catholic peoples of the world, and its imperial designs in the Caribbean. Wielded as a weapon to destabilize plantation development in rival colonies, the historical life of the policy illuminates how micro-histories of slave agency and macro-level imperial developments were entwined. This research has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Lapidus-Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the Conference on Latin American History, and the Tinker Foundation, among others. Her work has appeared in The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History and in the Journal of Global Slavery.
Dr. Bretones Lane offers undergraduate courses on Caribbean, Atlantic, Afro-Latin America, and Comparative Slavery.
Fernanda Bretones Lane é Bacharel e Licenciada em História pela PUC-SP (2008) e Mestre em História Social pela USP (2013). Foi bolsista do CNPq (2007, PIBIC-CEPE), da Fundación Carolina (2009-2010) e da Fapesp (2011-2013). Sua dissertação de mestrado, intitulada Notícias Insurgentes. Política, escravidão e imprensa periódica em Cuba no Contexto das Independências ibero-americanas (1811-1823), analisa as noticias publicadas em periodicos cubanos relativas a escravidão e aos movimentos insurgentes da América Espanhola.