So far, my career has developed through a series of different work environments, where I had the chance to experience the benefits of academic internationalization. I was educated at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, and defended my PhD in 2009 at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy. The EUI’s history department is recognised for its interdisciplinary and comparative approach, and my thesis was no exception to that. I analysed an interfaith diamond trade network in the first half of the 18th century and its agency regarding early modern globalization. My work focused on the global impact of early modern, and the role played by socio-cultural mechanisms such as kinship, religion and forms of integration. After leaving Italy, I held several postdoc appointments - at Oxford Brookes University (UK), University of Utrecht (Netherlands), Sorbonne (France) and University of Exeter (UK). At the latter, I worked on the early modern maritime labour market in the United Provinces and on the careers of Mediterranean-bound seamen in the late 16th and 17th centuries (within an ERC project managed by Prof. Maria Fusaro, entitled Sailing into Modernity: Comparative Perspectives on the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century European Transition). During several of those appointments, I taught in a variety of topics, languages and academic environments. Between 2018 and 2020, I was employed as a lecturer at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), also acting as tutor for first-year international students. In 2020, I applied for and obtained a FCT CEEC assistant researcher contract at the IHC, attracted by this institute’s international reputation in the critical study of empires, labour and transnational history of the Global South. My project is concerned with gender relations in the diamond industry (Are diamonds a girls best friend? - Women's work in a world of diamonds (1600-1850)), and in particular the participation of women in the diamond industry in mining, manufacturing and trading.