Oren Okhovat

Oren Okhovat is a current Postdoctoral Associate in Modern Jewish History in the Jewish Studies Program and Lecturer in the History Department at Yale University. He completed his PhD at the University of Florida in colonial Latin American and Jewish history, writing a dissertation on the transatlantic networks of Portuguese Jewish merchants in the seventeenth century. He completed a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Universidad de Sevilla and has won multiple grants to complete research in Curaçao, Spain, Portugal, and the U.S., and to work with digital repositories in the U.K. and the Netherlands. The sources gathered from these archives have been used to publish an article in the Colonial Latin American Review (2023) and a chapter in Aviva Ben-Ur and Wim Klooster, eds., Jewish Entanglements in the Atlantic World (Cornell University Press, 2024). His current book project focuses on the experiences of Iberian Jewish merchants active in Caribbean trade networks in the late-seventeenth century, demonstrating the extent to which Jewish merchants were integrated into the Spanish Atlantic world and the pragmatism (often construed as corruption) that permeated the Spanish empire. He has taught courses on Caribbean and Atlantic history, and the history of conversos and Jews in the Iberian and Dutch Atlantic. His interests include the history of Latin America and the Atlantic world, Sephardim and conversos, empire and colonialism, slavery and the slave trade, trade networks, and migration, mobility, and belonging.