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 co-supervise three PhD students working on religion, race, gender, and colonialism in the Iberian world. 

My book Black Catholic Worlds: Religious Geographies of Eighteenth-Century Afro-Colombia was published by Cambridge University Press's Afro-Latin America series in September 2025. 

Centring the lived experiences of enslaved and free people of colour, Black Catholic Worlds illustrates how geographies and mobilities – between continents, oceans, and region – were at the heart of the formation and circulation of religious cultures by people of African descent in the face of racialisation and slavery. This book examines black Catholicism in different sites – towns, mines, haciendas, rochelas, and maroon communities – across New Granada, and frames African-descended religions in the region as “interstitial religions.” People of African descent engaged in religious practice and knowledge production in the interstices, in liminal places and spaces that were physical sites but also figurative openings, in a society shaped by slavery. Bringing together fleeting moments from colonial archives, Fisk traces black religious knowledge production and sacramental practice just as gold, mined by enslaved people, again began to flow from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic world.

In 2023 I co-edited a special issue of Slavery & Abolition, Captive Mobilities: Movement, Slavery, and Knowledge Production in the Iberian World with José Lingna Nafafé.

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

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.'