Mayte Green-Mercado

Mayte Green-Mercado received her BA in History from the University of Puerto Rico, and her PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, specializing in Islamic Studies. Before coming to Rutgers, she was Assistant Professor of Mediterranean Studies in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. She is currently Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers-Newark, where she teaches courses on Islamic Civilization, Islamic history in Spain and North Africa, and early modern Mediterranean history. Her courses deal with questions of religion, politics, identity, and race and ethnicity in the medieval and early modern periods. 

Dr. Green-Mercado’s research focuses on the religious, cultural, and political history of the early modern Iberian, Mediterranean, and Islamic worlds. Her book manuscript currently under review, titled A Morisco Apocalypse: The Politics of Prophecy in the Early Modern Mediterranean, studies the production and deployment of apocalyptic prophecies among Moriscos, Muslims who were forced to convert to Catholicism in sixteenth-century Spain. Tracing the circulation of such prophecies within the Iberian Peninsula and the wider Mediterranean not only reveals a well-defined Morisco political culture, but it also places this minority group at the crossroads of the messianically-inflected Habsburg-Ottoman imperial rivalry for the control of the Mediterranean Sea. She has recently edited a special issue forthcoming in JESHO (Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient) forthcoming in January 2018, titled Speaking the End Times: Early Modern Politics and Religion from Iberia to Central Asia, that explores the cross-pollination of apocalyptic beliefs and practices among Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the early modern period. Her future projects include an exploration of Morisco diasporas and networks around the Mediterranean in the early modern period.