Myriam Iuorio

My doctoral project sits at the intersection of the history of disability, history of West Central Africa and scholarship on Renaissance processes of race-making. In particular, my work examines 17th and 18th century Italian missionary accounts from the Kingdom of Kongo, to explore how ideas and perceptions of bodily differences shaped the early modern encounter between European and African people. One of my aims is to illuminate the role of bodily observations in Renaissance processes of race-making that long impacted the European cultural and social landscapes. Using a critical disability studies lens, I question the conflation between the “monstrous” and disabled body and the African body in missionary writings, to uncover the role of bodily differences in early modern European processes of racialization. Furthermore, my project explores how these missionary writings provide important insights into the role of people with disabilities and the meaning of bodily impairments within early modern West Central African societies. In so doing, this project provides a significant contribution to the growing field of disability studies investigating past meanings and experiences of disability outside of Western categories of thought, with a specific focus on the overlooked African continent.
Before joining the IHPST, I obtained my BA and MA degrees from the History Department at the University of Florence, where I focused on the study of the cultural and intellectual history of eighteenth-century Europe. My research is supported by the Ontario Graduate Scholarship and I have been appointed as Victoria College Junior Fellow. In 2025 I was awarded with the Eighteenth-Century Africa Publication Fellowship, jointly sponsored by the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies and the African Studies Association.