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Bradley Mollmann, Ph.D.


Division of Humanities
History

Courses Taught

Origins of the Modern World (1500 to the Present); History of Spain; The Historian's Craft; The Age of Renaissance; Early Modern History of Spain: 1469-1818; The Atlantic World; Early Modern Witches; Heretics and Deviants

Education

  • Ph.D. History, Tulane University
  • M.A. History, Miami University
  • B.A. History, Ohio Northern University

Practice Areas

Bradley Mollmann is a historian of early modern Spain and its wider Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds. His research focuses on cultural and religious history and the history of medicine and science, with particular attention to skepticism, distrust, and the politics of verification: how inquisitors, physicians, and royal ministers tried to judge what was true – whether a person’s professed faith or a healer’s miraculous cure.

Research Interests

  • Early Modern Spain
  • The Spanish Inquisition and Heresy
  • Witchcraft, Demonology, and Skepticism
  • Moriscos and Religious Minorities
  • History of Medicine and Healing
  • The Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds

Publications and Media Placements

Book Chapters

"Vagabond Healers and Deviant Cures: Religio-Medical Healers at the Early Modern Castilian Hospital," in Hospitales durante el Antiguo Régimen: Instituciones benéfico-asistenciales, siglos XV–XIX, edited by Paula Barbero, Ana Barrena Gómez, and Rich Lizardo (Palermo: Palermo University Press, 2022).

"Healing with Demons? Preternatural Philosophy and Superstitious Cures in Spanish Inquisitorial Courts," in Demons and Illness: Theory and Practice from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, edited by Catherine Rider and Siam Bhayro (Boston: Brill, 2017).

Articles

"Reflections on Teaching the History of Colonization, Slavery, and the African Diaspora using Primary Sources and Historical Fiction," co-authored with Jayur Madhusudan Mehta, Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage (2020).

Reviews

Review of Estela Roselló Soberón, Enfermar y curar: Historias cotidianas de cuerpos e identidades femeninas en la Nueva España (Valencia: Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2017), in Dynamis 38, no. 2 (2018): 507–509.

Selected Presentations

"1609: Demonization, Distrust, and Crisis in Early Modern Spain," Renaissance Society of America, San Francisco, 2026.

"Witch Hunts, QAnon, and the Anatomy of Conspiratorial Thinking: A Comparative Study" (with Michael Rodgers), All That Melts Conference, SLU-Madrid, 2025.

"Morisco Healers, the Body, and the Body Politic on the Eve of Expulsion," invited paper, international conference En el paraíso de los altares, 2021.

"Medicine and Early Modern Cultural Conflicts: The Moriscos," invited lecture, INGENIO (CSIC–Universidad Politécnica de Valencia), 2017.

Professional Organizations and Associations

Member of the Executive Board for the Center for Iberian Historical Studies.