Patrícia Martins Marcos
Assistant Professor
I am a historian of science, medicine, race, and gender and sexuality interested in exploring how ideas about “Nature” – and contingent views about what a supposed innate natural order is – have been used to create, sustain, and legitimate hierarchies of humankinds. I also specialize on the history of Brazil and Portuguese colonialism in the Atlantic paying particular attention to its role in producing a new paradigm of enslavement during the early modern period: hereditary, perpetual, and racial slavery.
B.A., Licenciatura in History, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal), 2006
MSc., Cultural Studies and Public Administration, Department of Social Sciences, Roskilde University (Denmark), 2012
M.P.P. (Fulbright Fellow), Specialization in Science, Technology, and Society Studies, School of Public Policy, Oregon State University, 2015
Ph.D. in History (Science Studies), Department of History and Science Studies Program, University of California, San Diego, 2022
History of Race; History of Gender and Sexuality; Early Modern Science; History of the Life Sciences; History of Medicine and Heredity; History of Taxonomy and Natural Classification; Natural History; Biopolitics; History of Visual Culture; Epistemology; History of Colonialism; Latin American Studies; Black Studies; Critical Indigenous Studies; Critical Whiteness Studies
I am currently working on two book projects. The first, my main manuscript, Imperial Whiteness: Race, Patriarchy, and the Sciences of Human Improvement in the South Atlantic (1550-1850) documents and recovers the specific meaning of the Iberian concept of “race” (raça/raza), as it was used and recurrently rendered operable in Portugal and its Atlantic colonies. More concretely, the project historicizes how this early modern concept of race was scientific (avant la lettre), as it was based on the braiding of the four most authoritative languages of authority about nature in the early modern world: Greek medicine, Aristotelian natural philosophy, Christian theology, and Roman law. Initially, these four fields came together with the introduction of blood purity (limpeza de sangue) statutes in Portugal, and the establishment of a hereditary concept of race which, subsequently took a life of their own in Portugal’s many colonies. Delineating a trajectory from the attribution of racialization through religious affiliation to nineteenth century race science, the manuscript offers an early modern genealogy of racial whitening in Latin America. This story decenters the intersection between eugenics, modern biomedicine, and nation building in Brazil as the crux of state-led projects of racial whitening, instead focusing on how modern anxieties about controlling heredity, regulating reproduction, ensuring good racial stock, and preserving the purity of Iberian lineages stemmed from concerns first institutionalized through blood purity statutes. As such, the project treats whitening (branqueamento) as a specific response forged within Portuguese colonialism; one allowing the Portuguese empire to address its most pressing structural problem: the mismatch between its scant population and the vast and scattered nature of its empire.
My second project, A History of Blood: From Genesis to Genomics, offers a detailed inquiry into the many meanings, both material and metaphoric, of blood in Europe and the Americas. Crucial for life and essential to all European and Christian-based religious traditions, this project offers a panoramic integration of multiple scientific, religious, intellectual, and legal views of blood, inquiring into the multiple ways blood was used to negotiate meanings of belonging, honor, social privilege, and desirability.
Selected Scholarly Activity
Patrícia Martins Marcos and Leonidas Mylionakis, “Gender, Enslavement, and Trafficking,” A Cultural History of Slavery and Human Trafficking in the Age of Empire, (1700-1900), ed. Mariana Candido. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2025.
“Praxis is no Metaphor: Diasporic Knowledges and Maroon Epistemes to Repair the World.” Roundtable Discussion Decolonizing the ASECS, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 52 (2023): 61-66.
“White Innocence, Black Erasure: Reviewing Alcindo (2020) Against the Fictions of Portuguese Colonial Bonhomie.” Práticas da História, Journal on Theory, Historiography and Uses of the Past, N 16 (2023): 151-171.
“Blackness Out of Place: Black Countervisuality in Portugal and its Former Empire.” In Historicizing the Images of the Afropolitan, Rosa Carrasquillo, Melina Pappademos, and Lorelle Semley, Eds., Radical History Review, Issue 144, December 2022: 106–130.
“Refusing the Fictions of Unmarked Whiteness: Challenging Human Rank, Race, and History,” Refusing Eighteenth-Century Fictions, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 36, no. 1 (Jan 2024): 127-131.
“Repairing the future: rountable. / Como Reparar a Violência Colonial: Reflexões sobre Descentrar o Império e Reparar o Futuro,” with Inês Beleza Barreiros, Victor de Barros, Pedro Schacht Pereira, Rui Gomes Coelho, Práticas da História. Journal on Theory, Historiography and Uses of the Past, N. 15, (2023) 239–256.
Patrícia Martins Marcos with Sarah Naramore, Sarah Pickman, Sarah Qidwai, Myrna Sheldon, Kathleen Sheppard, “HSS Virtual Forum Futures Series,” Isis: Journal for the History of Science, vol 112, no. 3, (Fall 2021): 573-581.
Contact Me
Patrícia Martins Marcos
Department of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
The University of Oklahoma
601 Elm, Room 617
Norman, OK 73019
USA
Email: pmarcos@ou.edu
