Brian Hamm
Assistant Professor
Howard College of Arts and Sciences
History
308 Burns Hall
bhamm@samford.edu
205-726-4318

 

Brian Hamm is an historian of colonial Latin America and the early modern Atlantic world. Before coming to Samford in 2019, he was a Frankel Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan. His first book, Strangers and Kinsmen: Portuguese Immigrants and the Spanish Caribbean, 1492-1650 (under contract at LSU Press; expected publication in Summer 2026), explores how Portuguese immigrants negotiated the shifting debates regarding what it meant to be “portugués” in the early modern Spanish Caribbean, and how those debates shaped the opportunities and limitations of Lusitanian integration within colonial Spanish society. He is currently working on a second book project, Israel in the Indies: Creating Jews in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic, which examines how perceptions and constructions of “Jewishness,”including especially the imagined Jewishness of the Amerindians, influenced Spanish imperialdebates and ideologies during the early modern period. At Samford, Hamm teaches a variety of courses in Latin American history, as well as a survey course in modern world history (HIST 200) and a research methods course (HIST 300). Since 2021, he has served as the coordinator of Samford’s Global Studies Program.

Degrees and Certifications

• Ph.D., History, University of Florida, 2017
• M.A., History, University of Florida, 2012
• B.A., History (summa cum laude), Pepperdine University, 2010

Publications

• Strangers and Kinsmen: Portuguese Immigrants and the Spanish Caribbean, 1492-1650 (under contract at LSU Press, expected publication in Summer 2026)
• “From Jerusalem to Tenochtitlan: The Influence of Flavius Josephus on Early Modern Spanish Comprehensions of the New World.” In The Medieval Afterlife of Hellenistic Judaism: Reception and Reinvention in Western Europe, eds. Carson Bay, et al. (Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2025), 225-244.
• “A Jewish Proselytizer in the New World.” In Jews Across the Americas, 1492-Present, eds. Laura Leibman and Adriana Brodsky (New York: New York University Press, 2023), 38-41.
• “The Role of ‘Pestilence’ in the Historical and Political Writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas.” In Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters: Reflections of Political Theory from Antiquity to the Age of COVID, ed. Lee Trepanier (New York: Routledge, 2022), 104-113.
• “The Misadventures of Luis Méndez Chávez and the Origins of the Sephardic Colonization Movement.” Jewish History 35:1-2 (2021): 31-55.
• “Between Acceptance and Exclusion: Spanish Responses to Portuguese Immigrants in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Caribbean.” In The Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic World in the Long Sixteenth Century, eds. Ida Altman and David Wheat (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 113-135.
• “Constructing and Contesting Portuguese Difference in Colonial Spanish America, 1500-1650.” Anais de História de Além-Mar 17 (2016): 303-336.

Courses

• FOUN 101: Foundations
• GLST 300: Our Globalized World
• HIST 200: World History since 1500
• HIST 300: The Historian’s Craft
• HIST 350: Modern Latin America
• HIST 355: Colonial Latin America
• HIST 398: Witches, Heretics, and Inquisitions
• HIST 440: Riots, Rebellions, and Revolutions in Latin America
• HIST 495: Senior Seminar
• IDHU 201: Antisemitism: Past and Present
• UCT 101: Core Texts I
• UCT 102: Core Texts II
• UFWT 201: Western Intellectual Tradition III
• UFWT 202: Western Intellectual Tradition IV