The Botany of Colonial Science: Gender, Authority, and Natural History across Iberian Empires

This talk with use the intertwined personal stories of a prominent Portuguese physician and his South Asian female slave to suggest how gendered cross-cultural interactions characteristic of both the Spanish and Portuguese empires underwrote colonial natural history and distinguished it from its metropolitan counterpart. The talk will draw comparisons between the two Iberian empires and across both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean theaters of empire.