• Region(s): Portugal
• Time Period(s): 16th century; 17th century; 18th century
• Theme(s): Historiography; Portuguese Literature; History of the Book

   

Josiah Blackmore is Nancy Clark Smith Professor of the Language and Literature of Portugal in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.  He specializes in the literature and culture of medieval and early modern Portugal, with an emphasis on the writings of maritime expansion.  He also does work in medieval manuscript studies and the history of the book.  He has lectured in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and South Africa, and has served as Visiting Professor at Harvard and the Univ. of Chicago. Prior to Harvard, he was on the faculty of the University of Toronto.

Josiah Blackmore is the author of Moorings: Portuguese Expansion and the Writing of Africa (2009, selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title) and Manifest Perdition: Shipwreck Narrative and the Disruption of Empire (2002).  He co-edited Queer Iberia (1999) and edited the re-release of Charles R. Boxer’s The Tragic History of the Sea (2001) and the Songs of António Botto (2010) in the English translations of Fernando Pessoa.  He has published many articles and book chapters on medieval Galician-Portuguese poetry, historiography, Camões, shipwreck theory and literature, and other topics on Portuguese literary culture through the twentieth century.

In 2022, he published The Inner Sea: Maritime Literary Culture in Early Modern Portugal (Univ. of Chicago Press).

Editorial Board Member, Humanidades Book Series, Univ. of Coimbra, Portugal.
Series Editor, Medieval Iberia, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, Harvard Univ. Press.
Editorial Board, Toronto Iberic Book Series, Univ. of Toronto Press.