Anais de História de Além-Mar – Annals of Overseas History (AHAM) is a peer-reviewed journal published by CHAM, the Portuguese Centre for Global History. It aims to disseminate scientific work on the Portuguese expansion (15th – 20th centuries), its historical context, parallel phenomena, and the connections between the histories and the societies of all the spaces involved.
An upcoming volume of AHAM will include a thematic dossier on “Religion and otherness in early-modern overseas Iberian world”, edited by Bruno Feitler, Hugo Ribeiro da Silva and Jaime Teixeira Gouveia.

INTRODUCTION
Religious life is a particularly good field to study cross-cultural encounters, since religious norms and values are often (or always) prescriptive and absolute. Considering the interaction between individuals of different religious beliefs allows us to examine how the principle of “difference” articulates notions of “identity” and “otherness”. This might tell us about early-modern perceptions of race, gender, and religion.
The study of early-modern Catholic missions is particularly suitable in order to observe the way in which the Europeans described cultural and religious “otherness”, but also to analyze strategies of adaptation with the aim of “successful” conversion. However, the missionary was only one among others actors in the picture. What about the cooperation between merchants with different confessional belongings? What was the role of women in preserving African culture in the new world? How the Catholic Europeans saw the role of a native or color clergy? How was the interaction between Christians and non-Christians in Asia? The present call for papers aims to bring together research on how in the early-modern overseas Iberian world the “other” was observed in terms of religious practices and beliefs, what implies also to consider representations of “selfhood”. We encourage texts that help us to revise terms such as “tolerance” or “repression” as well as study the mental representations of different groups in their coexisting relations, weather peaceful or not.
The Anais de História de Além-Mar invites article proposals on “Religion and otherness in early-modern overseas Iberian world” for a thematic dossier scheduled to be published in the autumn of 2016.


The following topics, not only to be examined using large scales of enquiry but also to be studied and presented as case studies, are of particular interest (although other contributions are welcome):
- Writing about “the other” (and the self): missionary reports, travel literature, official texts (judicial sources, theological texts)…
- Material culture
- Religion and trade: cross-cultural exchanges
- Gender and racial issues
- Native clergy
- Theoretical and conceptual reflections on tolerance; hybridism; conversion; identity; “nation”; negotiation…
- Integration/resistance strategies.

Proposals of no more than 500 words should be sent together with a short biography (max. 200 words) to anais.cham@fcsh.unl.pt before September 1, 2015. We welcome contributions in Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, English, and French. All applicants will be notified regarding acceptance of their proposal by September 21, 2015. If accepted, the final manuscript, up to 10000 words (recommended), must be submitted for appraisal before December 17, 2015. The accepted proposals will be then submitted to double blind peer-review.
We also encourage researchers to submit proposals of original manuscripts on other topics than the thematic dossier, provided that they meet the thematic scope of the journal. Proposals of book reviews and of short accounts of academic events are also accepted. AHAM is permanently open to spontaneous proposals.