I am a gender and cultural historian whose research explores diplomacy, the environment, empire, and knowledge exchange in the early modern world. Drawing on multilingual archival research across Europe, Latin America and Asia, I examine how women shaped imperial and diplomatic relationships and the circulation of knowledge. My current research focuses on women and children in the Portuguese Empire, particularly in Brazil and Japan, with an interest in how women’s experiences and Indigenous knowledge were recorded, appropriated or excluded from colonial archives.

I am the author of two books. My most recent, Renaissance Masculinities, Diplomacy, and Cultural Transfer: Federico and Ferrante Gonzaga in Italy and Beyond (Amsterdam University Press, 2024), explores how elite men navigated conflict, diplomacy and cultural exchange in sixteenth-century Italy and beyond. My first book, Elite Women as Diplomatic Agents in Italy and Hungary, 1470–1510: Kinship and the Aragonese Dynastic Network (ARC Humanities Press, 2022), examines women’s diplomatic agency within European dynastic networks. My books have been reviewed in leading international journals, including American Historical Review.

My journal publications include research in Past & Present, The Historical Journal, Renaissance Quarterly, Gender & History, Women’s History Review and the Journal of Religious History. My Past & Present article on Indigenous women’s knowledge in colonial archives won both the ANZAMEMS Philippa Maddern Prize and the Australian Women’s History Network Mary Bennett Prize.

In 2026, I received the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia’s Paul Bourke Award for Early Career Research in Panel C, which encompasses History, Law and Legal Studies, and Philosophy. I have also held fellowships in Australia, Germany and Brazil, including the Harold S. Williams Fellowship at the National Library of Australia, a Max Planck Visiting Fellowship in Frankfurt, a Junior Fellowship at the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality–Inequality in Latin America at the University of São Paulo, and the Renaissance Society of America’s Paul Oskar Kristeller Fellowship.

I am a co-founder of WONDER, an international network advancing women’s and gender history in the Iberian Worlds. Through the network and my wider collaborations across Europe, Latin America and North America, I help build connections that support shared research and the exchange of ideas across national and disciplinary boundaries. My public-facing writing brings this research to broader audiences, exploring how gender and colonial power have shaped whose knowledge is recognised, whose stories are told, and how we understand the past.

Collaboration interests

I welcome opportunities to collaborate with researchers across disciplines and with libraries, archives, museums and other cultural organisations. Potential areas include gender and power, colonial histories, cultural exchange, and the recognition and representation of marginalised voices. I am particularly interested in exploring how historical perspectives can contribute to contemporary questions about knowledge ownership, institutional authority and the interpretation of collections and archives.

I welcome enquiries from prospective research students interested in gender, cultural and environmental exchange in the early modern world, particularly women’s experiences in the Portuguese Empire and connections across Europe, Latin America and Asia. My supervision interests also encompass diplomacy, material culture, cross-cultural encounters, histories of emotion, and the representation of marginalised voices and knowledge in historical archives.