I am currently completing a book manuscript, Theater of Conquest: Performing Iberian Expansion in Early Modern Rome (1450–1530). The project bridges diplomatic and performance history by exploring how news of Iberian expansion into Africa and Asia was transformed into public and private spectacles in Renaissance Rome. These performances ranged from engaging Roman citizens in the public destruction of a replica of the recently conquered Muslim city of Granada to staging, at a curial palace, an embassy of African rulers who pledged obedience to the pope and the king of Portugal.

The book argues that performances orchestrated by Iberian diplomats in early modern Rome served as sites for generating imperial discourses. It shows how the staging of Iberian expansion into Africa and Asia in Rome—a supranational center of diplomacy—contributed to the legitimation of Iberian imperial projects and to the creation of an Iberian hegemony within Roman and European diplomatic circles.

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