Though I’m a historian primarily of early modern Spain, I pay close attention to modern Spanish politics, as well, and hope that I’ll have the chance in the not-too-distant future to teach a broad course on modern Spanish history from Fernando and Isabel to Zapatero. As someone interested in questions of Spanish identity and nationhood, [...]
Normally, I try to keep this newsfeed relatively academic, but sometimes one has to make an exception for Wallace & Gromit … Happy Holidays!
This will be a busy spring for me, as on top of the usual teaching and research schedule I’ll be giving several papers. A quick note about the two on which I’ve been working most recently: In early March, I’ll be in Oslo, Norway for a conference, organized by Halvor Moxnes, on “Holy Land as [...]
Today’s New York Times reports on the results of a study using genetic testing to determine how many Jews and Muslims converted to Catholicism in the 15th and 16th centuries: The genetic signatures of people in Spain and Portugal provide new and explicit evidence of the mass conversions of Sephardic Jews and Muslims to Catholicism [...]
A quick notice for those readers in the Boston area: unfortunately, I’ve had to postpone my Pietro Martire talk until Monday, 15 December (same time and place) due to illness. I hope still to see many of you there!
As I’ve been working‚Äînot very well, I’m afraid, as I have spent all of the Thanksgiving holiday laid up with a cold‚Äîon my Pietro Martire paper for this week’s Early Modern Workshop at Harvard, I’ve been thinking a great deal about Natalie Zemon Davis’ Trickster Travels. Trickster, Davis’ re-imagining of the fascinating (and ultimately unknowable) [...]
On 2 December at 5:00pm I’ll be presenting a work-in-progress entitled “Pietro Martire in the Levant: Diplomacy and Orientalism in the Spanish Renaissance” as part of Harvard’s Early Modern History Workshop series. The talk will be held in the Lower Library [=1st floor] of Robinson Hall (map here). A bit of background: Martire (1457‚Äì1526) is [...]
I recently returned from Grand Rapids, MI, where I attended a small conference on “Renaissance Visions of Christian Origins” organized by Kate van Liere, Howard Louthan, and Simon Ditchfield. The conference was marvelous, and I hope to post a some new thoughts about historia sacra here in the near future. In the meantime, though, I [...]
As the Asst. Director of Undergraduate Studies in the History Department, I’m always happy to meet with students interested in studying history at Harvard‚Äîwhether to answer questions about policy or their intellectual interests. I typically hold four office hours per week, though I routinely spend at least a few additional hours meeting with students unable [...]
In 1860, the Parisian polymath Ernest Renan (1823–1892) stepped off a ship in Syria and surveyed the landscape that unfolded before him. Renan had come to the Levant on behalf of the French government, assigned by his doting patron Napoleon III to oversee an archaeological inquiry into ancient Phoenician antiquities. Though still young—he was not [...]