Ignacio Gallup-Díaz

Associate Professor and Chair
Department of History
222 Thomas Hall
610.526.5037
igallupd@brynmawr.edu

Publications:

The Door of the Seas and Key to the Universe: Indian Politics and Imperial Rivalry in the Darién 1640-1750, revised print edition, (Columbia University Press, 2005)

The Door of the Seas and Key to the Universe: Indian Politics and Imperial Rivalry in the Darién 1640-1750, (Columbia University Press, 2001).  An electronic book in the Gutenberg-e series accessible at http://www.gutenberg-e.org.

“The Spanish Attempt To Tribalize the Darién, 1735-50,” Ethnohistory, 49 (2002): 281-317.

“'Haven't We Come To Kill the Spaniards?'  The Indian Upheaval in Eastern Panama, 1727-8,” Colonial Latin American Review, 10 [2], (2001): 251-271.


Current Projects:

I'm currently developing several linked projects.  One examines sixteenth-century European ideologies of imperialism in the wake of the Spanish attainment of dominion over a good portion of the known world.  Specifically of interest to me are several Britons from the peripheries of Great Britain (specifically Wales and Scotland) who used their writings to urge Queen Elizabeth to recognize her royal responsibility to  establish an overseas territorial empire.  John Dee is the best known of these theorisits of a particularly British imperium.

Another examines free black communities in the Americas, focusing on Panamá, Suriname and the Carolinas as particular regions of interest. At the center of it is a body of slaves from early modern Panamá who performed several notable feats: they freed themselves from slavery; disrupted the movement of goods and supplies throughout the Panamanian passageway; opposed all Spanish efforts to subdue and re-enslave them; on occasion interacted with and assisted the enemies of Spain; and they ultimately established corporate communities that were recognized by the Spanish crown. It is my intention to provide a substantial contribution to the study of race in the early modern Atlantic World by describing Panamá’s free black towns in ethnohistorical detail for the first time.

I have recently begun the work on an article-length study of Juan Francisco de Páramo y Cepeda’s Alteraciones del Dariel. The Alteraciones, which carries a date of 1697, existed solely in manuscript form until it was recently transcribed by Héctor H. Orjuela and published in 1994. Páramo’s text is a poem crafted in the epic style containing extended, vivid descriptions of several of the people and events that I examined in the Door of the Seas through research in documentary sources. My aim is to investigate how Páramo, a Spanish Jesuit employed by the Inquisition in Cartagena, interpreted and poeticized the complex cultural and political interactions between the Darién’s indigenous people, Spanish officials, persons of mixed ancestry working to acquire colonial offices, and European interlopers.

Courses:
Fall 2007
History 101, The Historical Imagination
History 212, Pirates, Travelers, and Natural Historians 1492-1750