Our people

Dr Jessica O'Leary

Research Fellow - Gender and Women's History Research Centre

Areas of expertise: women and gender; history of children; cultural history; diplomacy; cultural transfer; global encounter; early modern studies

HDR supervisor accreditation status: Provisional

ORCID ID: 0000-0003-4260-522X

Email: jessica.oleary@acu.edu.au

Location: ACU Melbourne Campus

Jessica O'Leary is a Research Fellow at the Gender and Women's History Research Centre in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. She is a gender and cultural historian of the early modern period, interested in global history and connections between people around the world. Her current research involves women and children in the Jesuit Missions and the Portuguese Empire, especially in Brazil and in Japan. In 2024, she will be a Harold S. Williams Fellow in Japanese Studies at the National Library of Australia. She has previously held fellowships at the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre for Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America and at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory. She has recently published in Renaissance Quarterly and Past & Present and her second monograph has been released with Amsterdam University Press. She has previously published on the history of emotions and letter-writing, elite women and diplomacy, and on cultural encounter in the early modern period.

Select publications

BOOKS

• Echoes of Women: Indigenous and Settler Women in Portuguese America, 1500-1700, in progress.
• Renaissance Masculinities, Diplomacy, and Cultural Transfer: Federico and Ferrante Gonzaga in Italy and Beyond, Amsterdam University Press. Series: Renaissance History, Art and Culture, 2024.
• Elite Women as Diplomatic Agents in Italy and Hungary, 1470-1510: Kinship and the Aragonese Dynastic Network, ARC-Humanities Press, Series: Gender and Power in the Premodern World, 2022.

JOURNAL ARTICLES

• "Governadoras: Women administrators, gender, and colonization in sixteenth-century Portuguese America" Renaissance Quarterly, https://doi.org/10.1017/rqx.2024.20
• "The Uprooting of Indigenous Women's Horticultural Practices in Brazil, 1500-1650" Past & Present, accepted, Early View. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac047
• "Luís Fróis, Gendered Knowledge, and the Jesuit Encounter with Sixteenth-Century Japan," Historical Journal, Early View: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X23000109
• "The Lettres portugaises: Scripting and Selling Female Desire" Gender & History, Early View: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12670
• "Cultural immersion: diplomacy, learning and mobility in the childhood of Federico II Gonzaga during the War of the League of Cambrai (1508-1516)" Parergon Vol 38, No 2 (2021), 13-42.
• "'She performed miracles in women's clothing': Eleonora d'Aragona and the defence of co-rulership" I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, Vol 19, no 2 (November 2016) 285-307.

BOOK CHAPTERS

• “Converting the Cityscape: Performing civic pride in accounts of the 1585 Tenshō boys' Japanese embassy” eds. Katie Barclay and Jade Riddle. Urban Emotions and the Making of the City Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), 19-35.
• “New Christian family networks in the First Visitation of the Inquisition to Brazil” ed. Heather Dalton. Keeping family in an age of long-distance trade, discovery and settlement 1550 - 1850. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 193-212.
• “Wife, Widow, Exiled Queen Beatrice d'Aragona (1457-1508) and Kinship in Early Modern Europe” eds. Lisa Hopkins and Aidan Norrie Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 139-158.
• With Carolyn James, “Letter-writing and emotions” eds. Susan Broomhall and Andrew Lynch. The Routledge History of Emotions in Europe, 1100-1700 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 256-268.

Projects

• Women in the Global Portuguese Empire (1500-1800) (2023-2024)
  This collaborative project led by Dr Jessica O'Leary (ACU) and Dr Luisa Stella de Oliveira Coutinho Silva (Max-Planck-Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory) will organise a network, workshop and publication on women's history in the Portuguese Empire during the early modern period, with a focus on two themes that have been overlooked by past literature: a global history of law and of knowledges. Its main aim is to facilitate intellectual exchange among scholars of the global Portuguese empire and to publish cutting-edge research on these themes.
• Child slaveries in the early modern world: gender, trauma, and trafficking in transcultural perspective (1500-1800) (2023-2024)
  This collaborative project will draw on the combined expertise of specialists at the Gender and Women's History Research Centre at the Australian Catholic University and the Cluster of Excellence "Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies" at the Universität Bonn to shape a new theoretical framework for the examination of childhood slavery in the period 1500-1800.
• Gender and emotion in Japanese Christianity (1549-1638) (2022-2024)
  This collaborative project led by Dr Jessica O'Leary (ACU) and Dr Linda Zampol D'Ortia (Ca'Foscari/ACU) will investigate the use the gender and emotions as lenses to stimulate new analysis of the dynamics of intercultural dialogues in European and Japanese religious encounters.
• Echoes of Women in Early Portuguese America (1500-1700) (2022-2024)
  Women played a crucial role in the shaping and making of Portuguese America. Using written and visual sources, I aim to uncover the ways in which women contributed to and resisted the colonisation of Brazil through their interaction with, and understanding of, the land and the sea.

Accolades and awards

• Philippa Maddern ECR Publication Prize (2024)
• Harold S. Williams Fellow in Japanese Studies, National Library of Australia (2024)
• Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Bilateral Exchange Award (2023)
• Renaissance Society of America Paul Oskar Kristeller Fellow (2022)
• Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America Junior Fellow (2022)
• Australian Centre for Italian Studies Publishing Grant (2021)
• Royal Studies Journal Early Career Researcher Article Prize (2018)
• Monash Historical Studies Masters' Prize (2017)
• Cassamarca Dino De Poli Scholarship (2016)
• Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Award (2016)

Public engagement

• Contributor, The Conversation, article: “Decadence and trauma: delving into the emotional and political lives of three young Renaissance queens,” Published online: October 11 2023.
• Contributor, The Conversation, article: “In The Marriage Portrait, Maggie O'Farrell distorts the historical record to suit modern sensibilities,” Published online: October 17, 2022.
• Contributor, Medieval Warfare Magazine, article: “Princesses of Diplomacy in the Late Middle Ages,” forthcoming
• Contributor, “Textiles, Trade, and Meaning in the Courts of Northern Italy at the time of Isabella d'Este” Sponsored by Australian Centre for Italian Studies
• Committee Member, “Renaissance Children” Exhibition at Museum Hof van Busleyden, Mechelen, Belgium: 26.03.2021 - 4.07.2021" (2019-2021)