Céline Dauverd

University of Colorado Boulder (USA)

All the kings of the Mediterranean: the papacy and the conquest of North Africa, 1450–1620

2023–2024: Fall and Spring

Céline Dauverd is a scholar of the political and cultural history of the Italian Renaissance, with an emphasis on the histories of empire and religion in the Mediterranean world. Her work focuses on the socio-cultural relations between Italy, Spain, North Africa, and Türkiye c. 1440–1640. After obtaining her PhD in early modern European history at UCLA, she joined the University of Colorado Boulder where she is an Associate Professor of Mediterranean History. She is the author of three books published by Cambridge University Press: Imperial Ambition in the Early Modern Mediterranean (2015), Church and State in Spanish Italy (2020), and Colonialism and Resistance in Early Modern Europe (2024). She is currently guest editing a volume on the Spanish Empire for Mediterranean Studies (Penn State).

At the Italian Academy, she is crafting a new book, All the Kings of the Mediterranean: The Role of the Renaissance Papacy in the North African Conquest, 1450–1620, assessing the papacy’s temporal jurisdiction over the Iberian conquest of North Africa. By gauging relations between Muslim and Christian rulers through the prism of the popes’ pursuit of imperial power, All the Kings explores the popes’ unique involvement in the Maghrebi conquest via the notion of oikoumene or “inhabited world.” This book illustrates how the papacy redefined its imperium to claim sovereignty over the whole Mediterranean world, both Christian and Muslim, seeking leadership over all confessions.

In recent years, Dauverd has won fellowships from the Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies at Casa de Velázquez, Center for Humanities and the Arts at CU Boulder, Council of American Overseas Research Center (Istanbul, Rome, Tangiers), European University Institute in Florence, Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Harvard University I Tatti Center for Italian Renaissance in Florence, Humanities Research Institute at the University of California Irvine, and the Mellon Foundation at the Huntington Library.