Fernanda Bretones Lane

Fernanda Bretones Lane is a PhD candidate (ABD) in Latin American, Caribbean, and Atlantic history at Vanderbilt University, where she works with Dr. Jane Landers. Her dissertation, tentatively titled "Spain, the Caribbean, and the Making of Religious Sanctuary," examines imperial rivalry and religious conversion in the Early Modern Caribbean, particularly the movement of enslaved peoples across imperial borders motivated by what historians call the "Spanish religious sanctuary policy." To complete this project, Fernanda has been awarded a 2018 Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.

She is also the recipient of several research grants which have supported archival work in Cuba, Spain, England, and Italy, including The James R. Scobie Award (The Conference on Latin American History), Lapidus–OIEAHC Fellowship for Graduate Research in Slavery and Print Culture in the Early American and transatlantic world (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture), Herbert and Blanche Henry Weaver Summer Fellowship (History Department, Vanderbilt, 2015 and 2018) A&S Latin American Studies Field Research Award (Center for Latin American Studies, Vanderbilt), Pre-Prospectus Summer Fellowship (Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami), and Tinker Field Research Travel Award (Center for Latin American Studies). Fernanda was also a Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt, Germany, for six months during Fall 2017.

Fernanda has presented her work at academic conferences and workshops in the U.S. and abroad, in meetings of the Latin American Studies Association (Chicago, 2014), the Association of Latin American and Caribbean Historians (Vienna, 2014), at the Mark Claster Mamolen Dissertation Workshop on Afro-Latin American Studies (Hutchins Center at Harvard, 2017), the Society for Biblical Studies (Berlin, 2017) the Guest Workshop: Historia del Derecho en America Latina (Max Planck, Frankfurt, 2017), and at the Slave Subjectivities in the Iberian World Conference (Lisbon, 2018).

As the Graduate Editorial Associate for The Americas in 2017, Fernanda curated an online teaching and research collection on the topic of Afro-Latin America, having also written the introduction to this special issue. As a Library Dean's Fellow, she co-created an online exhibit on Afro-Colombian intellectual Manuel Zapata Olivella, and she has also been a contributor to the Slave Societies Digital Archive, digitizing endangered documents in Ceiba Mocha (Cuba) and transcribing some of the documents preserved by the project.

At Vanderbilt University, Fernanda co-coordinated the Brazilian Studies Reading Group (a student-led seminar sponsored by the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities) during AY 2014-2015 and AY 2015-2016, and at present she is the convener of the Latin Americanist & Caribbeanist Graduate Workshop. Fernanda also served as a Vanderbilt International Peer leader in 2014-2015 for the International Student and Scholar Service, helping incoming international students transition into their new life at Vanderbilt.