My name is Angel Rojas (He/Him/His) and I am interested in the role that science, non-European knowledge systems, race, and gender had on the early modern world (16th to the 18th century). Mainly, I am interested in a trans-imperial focus dealing with the traditional European empires like Spain, France, and Great Britain and their colonies in the Americas, East Indies, and the Pacific. I investigate the ways that indigenous people, enslaved Africans, and colonials impacted, shifted, contested, and added to the ongoing imperial knowledge project.
At present, I am in the middle of two main projects. The first delves into the profound impact that notions of colonial violence, particularly concerning poisonous plants such as manchineel, had on European empires' culture and colonial development. The second project explores a set of documents that shed light on the construction of a hospital for Les Femmes Folles (literally, Crazy Women) in the 1770s Martinique, a facility that housed patients with dementia and other neurological illnesses.
I also have three ongoing long-term side projects. The first side project deals with a recently discovered and digitized botanical manuscript written in Cuba in the 1820s by Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft (sister-in-law to Mary Wollstonecraft). The second side project looks at the commonplace, recipe, and cipher book of Catherine Haines, an American colonial woman in the mid-1700s. Finally, my last side project looks at the travel narratives of British women in the Pacific during the 1780s to 1820s and how these women depicted colonial violence and Indigenous people in their works.
Before I accepted my enrollment at the University of Pittsburgh in the Fall of 2022, I received my B.A. and B.S. in History and Biochemistry, respectively (2021) from California State University, Fresno (Fresno State) and my M.A. in History (2024) from the same university. During my undergraduate years, I worked in the lab of Dr. Hubert Muchalski synthesizing gold-catalyzed cyclic fusing of benzocyclic derivatives to create isocoumarins as part of independent studies and a two-year paid research position as a fellow for the NIH-funded Research Training Initiative for Scientific Enhancement (RISE). I also worked for a year synthesizing nanoparticles using green chemical methods under Dr. Jai Pil Choi. I later researched open educational resource materials and accessibility for low-income and disabled students in undergraduate chemistry courses under Dr. Dermot Donnelly-Hermosillo. During my graduate studies at Fresno State, I wrote my M.A. thesis on two British women travelers in the 1780s-90s, Maria Riddell and Mary Ann Parker, in the British Caribbean and Pacific and how these women observed, recorded, and incorporated instances of indigenous, enslaved Africans, and colonial peoples’ knowledge of their environments into the broader British imperial project.
While at the University of Pittsburgh, I plan to expand my knowledge of the colonial world and its sciences and challenge our modern understanding of Western science and medicine.
Advisors: Dr. Molly Warsh and Dr. Pernille Roge
