Carolina Mendoza

My research is focused on Islam as it is imagined through the Hispanophone world, especially via contact with Arabic and Persian. I am interested in how history and memory go to work in radical epistemological projects, with specific reference to contexts of subjugation.

My dissertation, “The Language of Light: The Epic of Muhammad in Hispanophone Islam, 1603–1719,” asks what it meant to sing of an outlawed Muhammad in the language of the Spanish Empire itself, after the Spanish Empire criminalized Islam. This historical ethnography traces a single Islamic devotional poem across years of contested assimilation, ethnic cleansing, and exile. My work excavates the banished futures dreamt up by the poem’s community as the lyrics moved between the Spanish, Ottoman, and British Empires—all the while refusing the civilizational thinking of each. I do so with particular attention to temporality, translation, and knowledge production at the very beginnings of Orientalism.

Beyond the dissertation, I am currently exploring new work on breakages of body and self through the Portuguese Empire’s expansions into Iran and India, thinking in particular about conversions, aesthetics, and acts of violence. I earned my doctorate from Brown University’s Department of Religious Studies (2025).