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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 in the Jesuit Missions and the Portuguese Empire, especially in Brazil and in Japan as well as elite diplomacy and masculinities in the early modern Mediterranean. In 2022, she was a Junior Fellow at the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre for Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America and in 2023 she will be a Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory. She has recently published in Past & Present and Historical Journal and her second monograph is under contract with Amsterdam University Press. She has also previously published on the history of emotions and letter-writing, elite women and diplomacy, and on cultural encounter in the early modern period.
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