Milan Francis

• E-mail: milan.francis@iisg.nl
• Department: Research

Milan Francis is a student assistant on the Exploring the Slave Trade in Asia and The Global Business of Slave Trade: Patterns, Actors and Gains in the Early Modern Dutch and Iberian Slave Trade projects. He contributes to the construction and curation of the Team/Individual Data Entry System (TIDES) for the ESTA Database and assists in the development of a Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) model for early modern Spanish manuscripts. 

His research focuses on indigenous resistance in the Andean altiplano region of present-day Peru and Bolivia. More specifically, his work relates to the Túpac Amaru Revolution (1780-83) and struggles over land and memory within Cusco’s peasant federations during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 

He is currently engaged in a research project titled “Desde ahora se denombraran Collas”: inter-ethnic cross-dressing in the shadow of ‘race war’, supported by the Slicher van Bath de Jong Foundation. The project analyses micro-historical case-studies of inter-ethnic cross-dressing during the Túpac Amaru Revolution in order to explore the role of materiality in shaping notions of ‘race’ and ‘Indianness’ in the context of anticolonial insurgency.

He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in history from Ghent University as well as a master’s degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Amsterdam. For his master’s thesis on the Túpac Amaru Revolution at Ghent University, he was awarded the André Schaepdrijverprijs (2023).