pmarcos@ou.edu
Physical Sciences Room 617
I am a historian of science, medicine, race, and gender and sexuality interested in exploring how ideas about “Nature” – and contingent views about what a supposed innate natural order is – have been used to create, sustain, and legitimate social and political hierarchy in human society. I also specialize in the history of Brazil and Portuguese colonialism in the Atlantic paying particular attention to its role in producing a new paradigm of enslavement during the early modern period: hereditary, perpetual, and racial slavery.
I am currently working on two book projects. Imperial Whiteness: Race, Patriarchy, and the Sciences of Human Improvement in the South Atlantic (1550-1850) documents and recovers the specific meaning of the Iberian concept of “race” (raça/raza), as it was used and recurrently rendered operable in Portugal and its Atlantic colonies. This project historicizes how this early modern concept of race was scientific (avant la lettre), as it was based on the braiding of the four most authoritative languages of authority about nature in the early modern world: Greek medicine, Aristotelian natural philosophy, Christian theology, and Roman law. Initially, these four fields came together with the introduction of blood purity (limpeza de sangue) statutes in Portugal, and the establishment of a hereditary concept of race which, subsequently, took a life of their own in Portugal’s many colonies. Delineating a trajectory from the attribution of racialization through religious affiliation to nineteenth century race science, the manuscript offers an early modern genealogy of racial whitening in Latin America. This story focuses on how modern anxieties about controlling heredity, regulating reproduction, ensuring good racial stock, and preserving the purity of Iberian lineages stemmed from concerns first institutionalized through blood purity statutes. As such, the project treats whitening (branqueamento) as a specific phenomenon forged within Portuguese colonialism; one allowing the Portuguese empire to address its most pressing structural problem: the mismatch between its scant population and the vast and scattered nature of its empire.
My second project, A History of Blood: From Genesis to Genomics, offers a detailed inquiry into the many meanings, both material and metaphoric, of blood in Europe and the Americas. Crucial for life and essential to all European and Christian-based religious traditions, this project offers a panoramic integration of multiple scientific, religious, intellectual, and legal views of blood, inquiring into the multiple ways blood was used to negotiate meanings of belonging, honor, social privilege, and desirability.
