Investigation as Education.

Historian, researcher, life-long student.

My name is Caroline Fish and I am a Ph.D. Candidate at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. My research focused on aristocratic women, politics, and international diplomacy in seventeenth-century Europe with a specific focus on the Spanish Monarchy. I am interested in the development of the position of the ambassadress (the wife of an accredited ambassador) as a component of Spanish statecraft and diplomatic praxis both in the immediate and the long durée. My Ph.D. dissertation, The Embajadora Networks: Gender, Politics, and the Development of Spanish Diplomacy, 1564-1697, addresses the development of the ambassadress position as a centering of female diplomatic methods in response to ongoing changes in international geopolitics during the Habsburg regime.

I have presented original research at a number of academic conferences in the United States and Europe. In 2022, I received a Fulbright Grant to Spain to engage in archival research at numerous archival institutions in Madrid, Simancas, and Toledo. I havealso received several more grants from Purdue University and the University of Luxembourg to present her research, including an award for Best Paper given by a PhD or Early Career Researcher from Our Interlocked Universe Conference and the Centre for Historical Research in March 2024.

An avid student and traveler, I privilege education techniques and pedagogy based in primary source analysis and traditional as well as digital history methodologies. I encourage curiosity in my students through engaging with primary sources as active learning tools while also emphasizing the scholarly arenas of argument and historiography. A list of my past and ongoing Digital Humanities Projects can be found here.