Dr. Ricard Torra-Prat

Research interests

• Early modern Spanish Monarchy, Crown of Aragon, and Catalonia
• Political corruption, anti-corruption, vigilance, and public office
• State-building, institutional history, and administrative ethics
• Petitions, summaries, epitomes, lists, and documentary chains in early modern government
• Archival practices, layout, preservation, and the materiality of administrative texts
• Digital Humanities and AI-assisted analysis of early modern administrative records

Personal information

Ricard Torra-Prat is a postdoctoral researcher at the Cluster of Excellence Cross-Cultural Philology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where he works in the project "Epitomizing: The Abbreviation and Expansion of Texts" within Research Area B, "Practices in the Layout, Preservation, and Archiving of Texts." His current project, "AIdeologized Subjects? Epitomizing political fidelity in the 17th-Century Spanish Monarchy," examines how the Council of Aragon transformed petitions, memorials, consultas, reports, and candidate lists into governable textual formats in post-rebellion Catalonia between 1652 and 1700. The project combines close archival reading with transcription, structured modelling, relational databases, and Digital Humanities/AI methods to study how practices of abbreviation and expansion shaped political classification, office-holding, and the careers of royal subjects.

He received his PhD in Comparative, Political and Social History from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in 2018 with the dissertation "La Visita del General de Catalunya: la institució i el seu encaix en el sistema institucional català d'època moderna (segles XV-XVIII)," awarded Excel·lent Cum Laude. He previously completed a degree in History and an MA in the History of Catalonia at the same university. Before joining the Cluster, he held predoctoral FI and FPU fellowships at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship at LMU Munich, a María Zambrano postdoctoral contract at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and a Beatriu de Pinós postdoctoral fellowship at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He has also been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship (2025 call) for the project "BELOWBLOWERS: Whistleblowers before Whistleblowing: Denouncing Corruption from below in the Seventeenth-Century Spanish Empire."

His work focuses on the history of corruption, anti-corruption, public office, vigilance, and state-building from the late medieval to the early modern period, with particular attention to Catalonia and the Spanish Monarchy. He is the author of Anticorrupció i pactisme. La Visita del General de Catalunya (1431-1714) (Afers, 2020) and has co-edited Com sobreviure a una tesi d'Humanitats (Anem Editors, 2021), Corruption, Anti-Corruption, Vigilance, and State Building from Early to Late Modern Times (Routledge, 2024), and Del territorio al Estado. Actores y poderes locales en la construcción de la Monarquía hispánica (siglos XVI-XIX) (Comares, 2024). He has published articles in journals including "Social History," "Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies," "Studia Historica. Historia Moderna," and "Revista Catalana de Dret Públic." He has taught at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and LMU Munich and has presented his research at conferences and invited seminars in Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Italy, Romania and Andorra.

Other activities

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded for "BELOWBLOWERS: Whistleblowers before Whistleblowing: Denouncing Corruption from below in the Seventeenth-Century Spanish Empire."
• Co-organizer of national and international conferences on corruption, anti-corruption, public office, local actors, and state-building.
• External reviewer for journals including "Investigaciones Históricas," "Obradoiro de Historia Moderna," "Studia Historica. Historia Moderna," "Cogent: Arts & Humanities," "Revista de Historia Moderna," and "Caplletra," and for publishers including Routledge and Oxford University Press.

Awards

• Prize of the Societat Catalana d'Estudis Històrics for the best bachelor thesis, 2013.
• Joan Reglà Prize in Early Modern History, Institut d'Estudis Catalans, for the best doctoral dissertation in Early Modern History, 2021.
• XXVI Ricart i Giralt Prize, Museu Marítim de Barcelona, with David Ferré Gispets, 2025.