Bio
Professor Terry-Roisin is an historian of early modern Europe with a particular emphasis on Spain, Italy, and the Mediterranean world. She is a second-field medievalist. She is both a Renaissance historian and an historian of chivalry in the longue durée. Her research has been supported by a Franklin Grant from the American Philosophical Society, and she serves on the Advisory Board of the Mediterranean Seminar, an organization whose conference she co-hosted in Miami with Hugh Thomas of the University of Miami in 2023. Her historiographic piece, "Renaissance Self-Fashioning after 44 Years: Hybridity, Conversos, Individuation, and Littérature Totale" has been published in The Historical Journal. Her first book, Morisco Knights in Renaissance Spain: The Granada Venegas Family in History and Memory (Manchester University Press, 2026), argues that both Renaissance culture and chivalric culture were part of how "nobility" was sought and defined in early modern Spain. It is the first book-length treatment of the successful assimilation of this significant family of Muslims who converted to Christianity at the fall of Nasrid Granada and is the first to incorporate sources from their complete family archive which has been divided in the modern period between Genoa and Granada. This Morisco family was active in the Renaissance movement in Granada and sponsored a group of poets. They also served on the battlefield and (through much effort) joined Spanish military orders. Her second book project (in progress) addresses the imperial history of the Society of Jesus in its first two hundred years. She has published an article on Jesuit understandings of nobility in eHumanista. Beyond her primary areas of expertise, Professor Terry-Roisin is also interested in comparative ideas of the “frontier” in Mediterranean, Spanish, and American history, in Spanish literature, mysticism, gardens, Romanticism, memory, and nineteenth-century American attitudes towards Spain. She teaches a range of courses at FIU including survey courses, The History of Spain, Renaissance and Reformation, The Knight, Forgotten Realms, seminars for majors on social and cultural history, and on kingship, graduate seminars on European history and historiography, and "Chivalry from King Arthur to American Evangelicalism."
