Dr Chloe Ireton

Associate Professor in the History of the Iberian World 1500-1800

Chloe Ireton

Chloe Ireton is Associate Professor of the History of Iberia and the Iberian World 1500-1800 and a British Academy Wolfson Fellow (2023-2026). Her research and teaching interests span the histories of slavery, freedom, empire, and subaltern public spheres in the early southern Atlantic world, as well as methods and theories for writing histories ‘from below,’ in particular working across the fields of social, cultural, and intellectual history, and with forays into methods and theories in microhistory, historical geography, urban history, and comparative, entangled, and global histories. 

Chloe’s first book, Slavery & Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic (Cambridge University Press, 2025) was awarded an Honorable Mention for the 2025 Natalie Zemon Davis Prize by the Sixteenth Century Society, and is also a Finalist for the 2026 Pauli Murray Book Prize, African American Intellectual History Society. The study is an intellectual history exploring how free and enslaved Black people in the early Atlantic conceptualized and contested ideas about slavery and freedom. From a free Black mother’s embarkation license to cross the Atlantic Ocean, to an enslaved Sevillian woman’s epistles to her freed husband in New Spain, to an enslaved man’s negotiations with prospective buyers on the auction block in Mexico City, to a Black man’s petition to reclaim his liberty after his illegitimate enslavement, the book explores how Africans and their descendants reckoned with laws and theological discourses that legitimized the enslavement of Black people and the varied meanings of freedom across legal jurisdictions. Their intellectual labor reimagined the epistemic worlds of slavery and freedom in the early modern Atlantic.

Chloe is currently conducting research for her second monograph, tentatively titled ‘Infrastructures of Black and Indigenous Political Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic’. The book project is an intellectual history of Black & Indigenous political thought in the early modern era that traces how subaltern individuals and communities gathered political knowledge and built patronage ties across different locales in the Atlantic world. This is a major connected and comparative study across Spanish, Lusophone, and West and West-Central African polities. Drawing on a fragmentary social history archive and a spatial approach to histories of ideas and political knowledge, the book traces the creation, circulation, and exchange of key political ideas among Black and Indigenous populations in and between the cities of Mexico City, Bogotá, Panamá, and Lima in the Spanish Americas and Sevilla, Madrid, and Lisbon on the Iberian Peninsula, and sites in West Africa and West-Central Africa. The project deploys methods in spatial history, urban history, social history, and comparative and connected histories and attempts to develop new methods and approaches to conceive of subaltern knowledge as political thought in the age of Atlantic slavery.

Chloe is also currently writing Plotting for Freedom, the history of an enslaved husband and wife whose quest for liberty spanned West Africa, Spain and Mexico. This is a trade book that aims for broad public dissemination and engagement with her research.

Chloe’s research has also appeared in the Hispanic American Historical Review, The European History Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, and Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, while her article “Black Africans’ Freedom Litigation Suits to Define Just War and Just Slavery in the Early Spanish Empire,” which appeared in the Renaissance Quarterly in 2020, and was awarded the Renaissance Society of America William Nelson Prize for best article published in Renaissance Quarterly. She has also contributed chapters to edited collections published by Cambridge University Press, University of Pennsylvania Press, Editorial de Universidad de Sevilla, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Editorial.

PhD supervision

Chloe welcomes inquiries from prospective graduate students in the following areas: the history of Iberia and the Iberian world 1500-1800; colonial Latin American History; Atlantic History; early Caribbean history; pre-colonial West Africa and/or West-Central Africa and the Atlantic world; Africans and their descendants in the Atlantic world; intellectual history and histories of ideas; histories of gender, empire, and race ‘from below’; new methodologies for histories of subaltern knowledge and thought, especially in Atlantic contexts; interdisciplinary and trans-regional approaches to Early Modern History; and cultural and social history.

Current students. I am currently second- or co-supervisor to the following students: José María Álvarez Hernández, ‘Black African Political Thought and its Impact on British and Spanish Imperial Foreign Policy,’ King’s College London; Jorge Varela Yepes, ‘Liberal thought in comparative perspective: the cases of Colombia and Chile, 1820-1880,’ UCL History.
 

Major publications

For a full list of publications, please see Chloe’s Iris profile.

Grants and projects

Chloe has held several major research grants and fellowships. Chloe is currently a British Academy Wolfson Fellow (2023-2026) working on her project ‘Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Modern Atlantic 1450-1750.’ In the past, Chloe’s research has also been supported by the following grants and funders: British Academy / Leverhulme Small Research Grant; Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación de España; John Carter Brown Library Helen Watson Bucker Memorial Fellowship; The Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Studentship; Social Science Research Council Andrew W. Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship SSRC-IDRF; American Historical Association Albert J. Beveridge Grant; The Huntington Library W. M. Keck Foundation Fellowship; Renaissance Society of America Research Grant; Conference on Latin American History. Chloe has also held institutional affiliations with the Departamento de Historia at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, the Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City, and the Área de Historia Moderna at the Universidad de Pablo Olavide in Sevilla. 

Media Appearances/Public Engagement

Chloe regularly engages the public about her research and teaching through public lectures, interviews, and historical consulting. In 2021, Chloe co-organized “Beyond Eurocentrism in Intellectual History, a colloquium,” with Professor Nicola Miller. In 2021, Chloe also worked on an interdisciplinary collaboration with John Beusterein and Sara Pink on antiracist pedagogy, culminating in their co-authorship of ‘Callejeando Sevilla histórica: Una caminata antirracista por la ciudad, [Walking the streets of historic Seville; an anti-racist walk through the city]” co-authored with John Beusterein and Sara Pink, in Hispania 104.1 (2021): pp. 332–42. Chloe also supports various Widening Participation initiatives, most recently co-leading the UCL History Undergraduate Induction Project with Dr. Patrick Lantschner. Chloe is also regularly involved in community education projects. 

Teaching

At the core of Chloe’s pedagogical approach is a commitment to inclusive education, inquiry-based learning, and emancipatory learning through the acquisition and development of academic skills that will empower our students to succeed at UCL and beyond. Chloe’s undergraduate and graduate modules are wide-ranging in their geographical and temporal scope, encompassing colonial Latin American history, Atlantic history, early modern southern European history, and pre-colonial West and West-Central African history, approaches and debates in cultural history, and training in historical methods.


Roles and Qualifications

Departmental/university roles

  • Director of External Engagement (2025-2026)
  • Steering Committee for UCL Centre for Global and Transnational History
  • Pathway Lead: MA History, Culture, Ideas, and Identities Pathway (2025-2026)
  • First-in-Family & Working Students Student-Staff Network lead in the History Department (2022-2023)

External Roles
Co-convenor, IHR Europe & the World 1500-1800 seminar

Co-Convenor of Anticolonial Political Thought, an interdisciplinary seminar at UoL  (since 2024)

Qualifications
PhD, The University of Texas at Austin, 2018
 

Contact

Email: c.ireton@ucl.ac.uk

X: @ChloeIreton

Telephone: 0207 679 4133

Office: 204, 24 Gordon Square

Student support & feedback hours: Thursdays 3.30-5.30pm (Term 1) Tuesdays 4-6 (Term 2), & by appointment (Term 3). Book here.

Student support & feedback hours are an opportunity for students to chat with their module tutors about their ideas, any support they might need with the module, and to go through feedback from their assessments.