Reorienting Early Modern History: Current Research in Conversation with Mercedes García-Arenal
Attendance is free, but please register by noon on Monday 4 May, by emailing iberian@history.ox.ac.uk
Professor García-Arenal is arguably the most important living historian of early modern Spain. She is Research Professor Emerita at the Institute of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the CSIC in Madrid. In 2019, Professor García-Arenal was awarded the Premio Nacional de Investigación 'Ramón Menéndez Pidal', Spain's most important scientific prize, and she is member of the Scientific Council of the ERC. Professor García-Arenal's books, such as A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew between Catholic and Protestant Europe (2006) and The Orient in Spain: Converted Muslims, the Forged Lead Books of Granada and the Rise of Orientalism (2013), are now considered classics.
This workshop is intended as an informal celebration of Professor Mercedes García-Arenal's scholarship and her special connection with the Iberian History at Oxford research group, on the occasion of her invitation to deliver the 2026 Lyell Lectures. The event will emphasise the importance of Professor García-Arenal’s contributions to our understanding of the early modern period. In particular, we will acknowledge her work on the Moriscos and Islam and their centrality to European religious and intellectual history. Professor García-Arenal’s research has also transformed the way in which historians approach the history of minorities and the concept of race, shifting the focus of major historiographical debates towards Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Mediterranean world more broadly.
Programme
14:00 | Welcome and Introduction
Giuseppe Marcocci (Exeter College, Oxford), The Legacy of Islamic Spain to the Early Modern World
14:15 | New Research Directions – Chair: Teresa Witcombe (Koch Centre, Oxford)
Maayan Aner (St Peter’s College, Oxford), The Inheritance of Queerness: Converso Families Coping with Sodomy Trials
Ana Struillou (King’s College London), Thinking from the Strait: Iberian-Maghribi Dialogues at the Edge of Empires
Euan Huey (Wolfson College, Oxford), Knowledge and Conflict in Southeast Asia: A Malay Repository in the Hands of a Spanish Governor
15:45 | Coffee break
16:15 | Roundtable (Chair: Giuseppe Marcocci, Exeter College, Oxford)
Karoline Cook (Royal Holloway, University of London)
John-Paul Ghobrial (Balliol College, Oxford)
Rosa Vidal Doval (Magdalen College, Oxford)
17:00 | Closing Remarks: Mercedes García-Arenal (CSIC, Madrid)
17:30 | Drinks
