
Dr Fernando Cervantes
M.A.(Oxon.), Ph.D.(Cantab.)
Current positions
Reader in History
Department of History (Historical Studies)
Contact
Press and media
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Research interests
Office: 2.2 26 St Michael's Park
Phone: +44 (0)117 928 7933
Email: f.cervantes@bristol.ac.uk
Fernando Cervantes is a historian of early modern Europe specialising in the intellectual and religious history of early modern Spain and Spanish America. Between 2005 and 2008 he was principal investigator of a major Leverhulme Research Project entitled The Celestial and the Fallen: Angels and Demons in the Hispanic World. With Dr Andrew Redden of Liverpool University, he is currently completing work on a co-authored monograph. A co-edited collection of essays entitled Angels, Demons and the New World was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. His most recent book, Conquistadores: A New History, was published by Allen Lane/Penguin in 2020 and by Viking in 2021. Longer term projects include a study of the literary imagination of early modern Europe that seeks to place the works of Montaigne, Cervantes and Shakespeare in the wider context of early modern humanism and the epistemological crisis of the early seventeenth century. Dr Cervantes was the John Coffin Memorial Lecturer in the History of Ideas at the University of London in 2005 and has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA, and the Liguria Study Centre for the Arts and the Humanities, Bogliasco, Italy. In the Spring quarter of 2009 he held the Tipton Distinguished Visiting Chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was also Series Editor for Pickering and Chatto's (now Routledge) "Religious Cultures in the Early Modern World" until 2018.
Research supervision
He has supervised PhD students on a wide range of subjects, from the phenomenon of diabolism in colonial Peru, to the Cristero Revolt in post-revolutionary Mexico. He would welcome research proposals on any area of the intellectual or religious history of early modern Spain or Spanish America.
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
THE MENTAL WORLD OF MIGUEL DE CERVANTES 1547-1616
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American StudiesDates
01/02/2003 to 01/06/2003
Thesis supervisions
Publications
Recent publications
28/07/2022Le siècle des Conquistadors
Le Figaro Histoire
Dire Straits
History Today
Les Conquistadors
Les Conquistadors
Contested Legacy of the Conquistadors
History Today
Conquistadores
Conquistadores