Speakers

Susumu Akune received his PhD from Kyoto University in 2022. He is currently a part-time lecturer at Konan University and a researcher at the National Museum of Japanese History and the Toyo Bunko, where he co-curated the special exhibition “Christian Missions and Cross-cultural Exchanges in Asia” (January–May 2024). His research explores the history of the Jesuit Japan Province’s transregional enterprises encompassing Japan, Macau, and Southeast Asia; this line of inquiry is reflected in his latest article, “António Francisco Cardim at the Conjunctures of the Far East and Portugal: Procurador, Propaganda, and the Surviving Presence of the Jesuit  ‘Japan’ Province” (Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko, No. 83, 2026).

My research focuses on medieval and early Renaissance intellectual history and is structured around three main areas. First, my doctoral work involved the study, critical edition, and translation of Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo’s Compendiosa Historia Hispanica (15th century), through which I examine late medieval Iberian historiography. Second, I study the formation of courtly culture through medieval educational texts (11th–16th centuries) and scholarly commentary as a pedagogical practice, including a critical edition of Alfonso de Madrigal’s commentary on Eusebius’ Chronicon mundi and studies on Antonio de Nebrija and the University of Alcalá. Finally, my work addresses the reception of classical heritage in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Alexandre Coello de la Rosa earned his PhD at SUNY Stony Brook (USA). He is a Professor of History in the Department of Humanities at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF, Barcelona). He serves as co-editor of the journal Illes i Imperis / Islands and Empires and currently coordinates the Master’s Programme in Asia-Pacific Studies in a Global Context at UPF. His most recent publications include two books on the seventeenth-century cathedral chapter of Manila (Palgrave, 2025) and a co-edited volume with Fabian Fechner, Political Agents and Cultural Mediators: Jesuit Procurators in a Globalizing World (16th–18th Centuries) (Brill, 2026). He is currently completing a co-edited volume with Martín Álvarez Tobos on the pastoral visitations of Archbishop Hernando Arias de Ugarte (1619–1623), forthcoming with IFEA and Universidad Javeriana in 2026.

Fr. Renzo De Luca, SJ, was born in Larroque City, Argentina, on July 28th, 1963. In 1981 he entered the Society of Jesus. After Noviciate and Juniorate in Argentina, he was sent as a Missionary to Japan in 1985. He was ordained priest in 1996 and sent to Nagasaki, where he assisted in the 26 Japanese Martyrs’ Museum, and became Director of it in 2004. From 2017 till 2023 he was the Provincial of the Japan Province of the Society of Jesus. From June 2023 he became (again) the Director of the 26 Japanese Martyrs Museum (till present).

Bernat Martí Oroval (Valencia, 1979), PhD in Philosophy from the University of Valencia (Spain), is an Associate Professor at Waseda University. He previously served as Associate Professor at Sophia University (2017–2020). His research focuses on the history of Japanese thought and the influence of Western philosophy on Buddhism during the Meiji era. He also studies the activities of Spanish missionaries in the Americas and Japan during the 16th and 17th centuries, analyzing their missionary anthropology as well as their interpretations of local cultures and religions. He has authored more than thirty publications, including the monographs Escritos sobre el espiritualismo (UAM Ediciones, 2017) and A Missionary Dispute over Confirmation under the Japanese Persecution of Christianity (Shunjūsha, 2023).

Miguel Martínez (PhD The Graduate Center, CUNY) is Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Front Lines. Soldiers’ Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), Comuneros. El rayo y la semilla (1520-1521) (Xixón: Hoja de Lata, 2021) and of a critical edition of Catalina/Antonio de Erauso’s Vida y sucesos de la Monja Alférez (Madrid: Castalia, 2021). He is working on a book project on literature and urban culture in colonial Manila, and currently chairs the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago.

Dr. Kazuhisa Takeda is an Associate Professor at Meiji University in Japan. He is the co-editor of Pastoral Care and Monasticism in Latin Christianity and Japanese Buddhism (ca. 800–1650) (Lit Verlag, 2024) and Indigenous Knowledge as a Resource: Transmission, Reception, and Interaction of Global and Local Knowledge between Europe and the Americas, 1492–1800 (Tübingen University Press, 2021). His research focuses on the historical development of Native American Christianization in colonial South America under Jesuit missionary activity from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. As a visiting scholar at Victoria University of Wellington between 2024 and 2025, he also researched the history of Māori Christianization in early New Zealand and its socio-cultural impacts on Māori traditions and customs.

Dr. Takeyama, former clerk and curator of the Kirishitan Bunko Library at Sophia University, holds a PhD from the same university. His research examines those who secretly practised Christianity during the persecution in the Edo period, focusing on their distinctive doctrines, the actual situation of organisations and groups that maintained their faith, and the forms of resistance to the Tokugawa shogunate system through historical research based on primary sources and fieldwork. Particularly, he has thus far demonstrated that the Kirishitans under persecution existed across different strata in both early modern society and the Christian worlds (Christandades), and the attitudes towards their sole faith were not uniform.