The Mediterranean initiative is very pleased to welcome the third of our four new faculty: Marya T. (Mayte) Green-Mercado (RLL)

Mayte Green-Mercado completed a B.A. in European History at the University of Puerto Rico in 1996 and received her PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in 2012.  Her work lies at the intersection between the religious, cultural, and political history of the early modern Iberian, Mediterranean, and Islamic worlds.  In her dissertation,“Morisco Apocalypticism: Politics of Prophecy in the Early Modern Mediterranean,” she analyzes the role of apocaplyptic prophecies, millenarianism, and providentialist beliefs in the religious practices and political life of Moriscos (Muslims forced to convert to Catholicism), notably as a means of cultural and political resistance and of political and communitarian identity-formation. Future projects include explorations into a broader religious and intellectual history of the early modern period through the lens of Morisco networks around the Mediterranean.  She is the author of “The Mahdi in Valencia: Messianism, Apocalypticism, and Morisco Rebellions in Late Sixteenth- Century Spain,” Medieval Encounters (2013).  She previously taught in the Department of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.