Dr Bethan R Fisk

I am lecturer in colonial Latin American history in the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies. My research focuses on black knowledge and cultural geographies in New Granada (Colombia) and the Caribbean. My teaching explores black and indigenous knowledge production, slavery, and religion in Spanish America and the early modern world. 

I recently co-edited a special issue of Slavery & Abolition, "Captive Mobilities: Movement, Slavery, and Knowledge Production in the Iberian World." https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/fsla20/44/3 

See my open-access article, "Enslavement between Worlds: Manuel Zapata’s Many Captive Mobilities" here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0144039X.2023.2236433

My 2022 article (available open access) “Transimperial mobilities, slavery, and becoming Catholic in eighteenth-century Cartagena de Indias” examines the tranimsperial mobilities of enslaved sailors and their circulation of religious knowledge through Inquisition trial records. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14701847.2022.2140950

I am finishing a book titled "Black Catholic Worlds: Religious Geographies of Eighteenth-Century Colombia," the first full-length study on religious practice of people of African descent in eighteenth-century New Granada. Under contract with Cambridge University Press, it focuses on New Granada’s Caribbean and Pacific coastal regions and the territories that connect them rather than the Viceroyalty’s imperial and geographic centre, the book examines sites that were shaped by slavery and which had large black, indigenous, and Afro-indigenous populations. Examining the Caribbean (the provinces of Cartagena de Indias, Santa Marta, and Riohacha), Antioquia, and the Pacific (Chocó and Popayán), "Black Catholic Worlds" argues that place, space imbued with meaning, played a constitutive role in black religious practice. 

My second project, for which I received the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship which I held from 2020-2023, explores black mobilities and shared histories of slavery and freedom between Jamaica and Colombia. 

I received the Atlantic Studies Early Career Prize for my 2021 article “Black knowledge on the move: African diasporic healing in Caribbean and Pacific New Granada." 

About the Atlantic Studies Early Career Prize https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rjas20/collections/best-paper-prize-atlantic-studies 

The judges, Prof. David Lambert, University of Warwick and Prof. Brooke Newman, Virginia Commonwealth University, commended the article with the following: 'In “Black knowledge on the move: African diasporic healing in Caribbean and Pacific New Granada,” Bethan Fisk challenges conventional assumptions about the cultural geographies of the African diaspora and the construction of Black healing and ritual knowledge in seemingly distinct sites of enslavement. Using an impressive array of fragmentary judicial records, she shows how African-descended healers in Caribbean and Pacific New Granada moved in and between Atlantic and Pacific regions, creating and exchanging Black healing and religious practices through everyday movement and interactions.'