Ana Travassos Valdez

e-mail | anatvaldez@edu.ulisboa.pt

Ana T. Valdez (PhD History, 2008, University of Lisbon) is an Associate Researcher at the Centre for History of the University of Lisboa, where she is the PI (Principal Investigator) of the project CEECIND/00139/2017. In 2019, she discovered the original manuscript of António Vieira’s, SJ magnum opus – Clavis Prophetarum that was presented to the public on May 30, 2022 (https://eschaton.letras.ulisboa.pt/en/oggi-trovato-en/). She is now working on a critical edition and translation into English of the Clavis Prophetarum to be published by Peeters Publishers. She teaches in the Department of History of the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon courses related to religion, namely apocalyptic literature, Judaism, Christianity, and philosophy of religion. In the past, she was an academic visitor in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford, working with Professor Howard Hotson in his program Cultures of Knowledge and EMLO (2017-2019). Before, she was an Assistant Researcher at CIDEHUS through an IF Starting Grant. Earlier In her career, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, under the supervision of Professor Carlos Eire, and has taught at Brown University, Columbia University, Yale University, and the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Her research focuses on the early apocalyptic movements and literature and on the intellectual, cultural, and religious history of the early modern Iberian world, focusing on the history of the Portuguese Atlantic and the Iberian imperial ideologies. She is currently exploring the circulation of eschatological ideas within the space of the Atlantic and how Catholics, Jews, and Protestants engaged in an interreligious dialogue leading to expressions of religious tolerance while promoting the creation and development of intellectual networks. In addition, she analyzes the correspondence between eschatological networks and the so-called “religious terrorism” of the 21st century. She is the co-chair of the Bible and Empire and Apocalyptic Literature research programs at iSBL and co-chair of the Apocalypse Now: Apocalyptic Reception and Impact Throughout History seminar at SBL. She also organizes a yearly research program titled ‘Violence in the Name of God’ that created an international network of scholars with expertise in apocalyptic expectations, PoliSci, Peace Studies, and Terrorism. She has published widely on apocalyptic literature and imperial ideology in the Iberian world, particularly on the opus magnum of the Portuguese Jesuit António Vieira, the unfinished Clavis Prophetarum. Her publications include Historical Interpretations of the “Fifth Empire”: The Dynamics of Periodization from Daniel to António Vieira, SJ (Brill, 2011). She is the co-editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed series Apocalyptic Trajectories published by Peeters Publishers. She was the co-editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed series The Iberian Religious World, published by Brill until 2022.