New Books in Iberian Studies
by New Books Network
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork
Episodes
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Constructing Christendom: Conquest and Diocese Formation in Medieval Iberia with Thomas W. Barton (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026)
In Constructing Christendom: Conquest and Diocese Formation in Medieval Iberia (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026), Dr. Thomas W. Barton examines how church leaders partnered with lay rulers to integrate lands conquered from the Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula from the ninth through the fourteenth...
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Spanish Louisiana: Contest for Borderlands, 1763–1803 with Frances Kolb Turnbell (LSU Press, 2024)
Sandwiched between the long period of French colonization, and the brief return to the French empire before the Americans enter the scene, the Spanish period of Louisiana's history is often ignored by historians. Yet, according to University of North Alabama historian Frances Kolb Turnbell,...
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Europe in the Eleventh Century: Beyond Revolution and Reform with Charles West (Oxford UP, 2025)
Eleventh-century Europe was diverse and fast-changing. Historians have often debated this change through two sets of competing arguments, one about the shifting role of the Church and the Papacy, and the other about the rise of castellan lords and a proliferation in violence. Yet these arguments...
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Bernardo de Gálvez: Spanish Hero of the American Revolution with Gonzalo M. Quintero Saravia (UNC Press, 2026)
Although Spain was never a formal ally of the United States during the American Revolution, its entry into the war definitively tipped the balance against Britain. Led by Bernardo de Gálvez, supreme commander of the Spanish forces in North America, their military campaigns against British...
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Travis Bruce, "Constructing the Medieval Maritime State: Identity, Violence, and Connection in the Mediterranean" (Oxford UP, 2026)
Constructing the Medieval Maritime State: Identity, Violence, and Connection in the Mediterranean (Oxford University Press, 2026) by Professor Travis Bruce explores how the small medieval kingdom of Denia in Spain became a powerful maritime state after the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate. Its...
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Cycling Cities: Lisbon and Tehran with M. Luísa Sousa and Kazem Afradi
Cycling Cities is a series of books that investigates 150 years of cycling policy and practice across fifty cities in twenty-five countries, and keeps adding new cities to the list including, recently, Lisbon and Tehran. In this episode, I interview two authors, M. Luísa Sousa and Kazem Afradi,...
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Marta Dominguez Diaz, "Tunisia's Andalusians: The Cultural Identity of a North African Minority" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)
Tunisia’s Andalusians: The Cultural Identity of a North African Minority (Edinburgh UP, 2025) tells the captivating story of those Andalusians, descendants of Muslims expelled from Spain in the seventeenth century, who sought refuge in Tunisia. Rather than simply replicating Iberian traditions,...
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Romani Grassroots Language Learning
In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Emily Pacheco speaks with Dr Santiago Betancor Falcón (University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain) about his 2025 paper, Autonomous language learning as political activism: Roma autodidacts as catalysts of the nascent Romani language...
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Henry T. Drummond, "The Cantigas de Santa Maria: Power and Persuasion at the Alfonsine Court" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Amongst the many achievements of the Castilian court of King Alfonso X (1221-184) is the Cantigas de Santa Maria, a collection of 429 songs preserved in four manuscripts. In The Cantigas de Santa Maria: Power and Persuasion at the Alfonsine Court (Oxford UP, 2024) Henry T. Drummon re-examines a...
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Colloquies on European Civil Procedure: A Conversation with Marco de Benito
This volume brings law to life through a free and lively dialogue on the new Model European Rules of Civil Procedure. In it, some of Europe's leading jurists engage in a free-wheeling discussion of the most important issues in procedural law today. With its elegant style and unconventional...
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Santiago Muñoz-Arbeláez, "The New Kingdom of Granada: The Making and Unmaking of Spain's Atlantic Empire" (Duke UP, 2025)
The New Kingdom of Granada: The Making and Unmaking of Spain's Atlantic Empire (Duke UP, 2025) tells the history of the making and unmaking of empire in the diverse and decentralized Indigenous landscapes of the Northern Andes. Santiago Muñoz-Arbeláez examines the intricate and disputed…
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Foster Chamberlin, "Uncivil Guard: Policing, Military Culture, and the Coming of the Spanish Civil War" (Louisiana State UP, 2025)
In Uncivil Guard: Policing, Military Culture, and the Coming of the Spanish Civil War (Louisiana State UP, 2025), Foster Chamberlin evaluates the role of militarized police forces in the political violence of interwar Europe by tracing the evolution of one such group, Spain’s Civil Guard,...
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Jonathan Sherry, "Stalinism on Trial: Communism and Republican Justice in the Spanish Civil War" (Liverpool UP, 2025)
Stalinism on Trial: Communism and Republican Justice in the Spanish Civil War (Liverpool University Press, 2025) is a history of Communism and anti-Communism in the Spanish Civil War. It uses newly available archival material to reassess Soviet intervention in Spain and reappraise the role of...
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Manuela Ceballos, "Between Dung and Blood: Purity, Sainthood, and Power in the Early Modern Western Mediterranean" (U California Press, 2025)
Manuela Ceballos’ new book Between Dung and Blood: Purity, Sainthood, and Power in the Early Modern Western Mediterranean (University of California Press, 2025) engages with the life and legacies of two sixteenth-century saints; the Spanish Christian Teresa de Jesús (also known as Teresa of…
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Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters, "The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World" (Harvard UP, 2026)
The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters (Harvard UP, 2026) is a groundbreaking history of political struggle in the Spanish New World, where commoners and elites alike challenged the social order through the remarkable...
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Paul Gillingham, "Mexico: A 500-Year History" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025)
Mexico is among the most unique nations in the world, writes Northwestern University historian Paul Gillingham in Mexico: A 500-Year History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025). The country has several claims to fame in this regard - one of the first to abolish slavery, North America's first Black...
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James Giesler, "Francisco de Saavedra's American Revolutionary War, The Spanish Contribution to the Battle of Yorktown" (James Giesler, 2025)
Francisco de Saavedra’s American Revolutionary War: The Spanish Contribution to the Battle of Yorktown (James Giesler, 2025) by James Giesler is the story of how the decisive victory in the American Revolutionary War, at the Battle of Yorktown in October 1781, was the result of French and Spanish...
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Santiago Fouz-Hernández, "The Films of Bigas Luna" (Manchester UP, 2025)
Written by Professor Santiago Fouz-Hernández (Durham University), The Films of Bigas Luna (Manchester UP, 2025) is the first comprehensive English-language study of the complete filmography of Spanish filmmaker Bigas Luna, spanning from Tatuaje (1976) to DiDi Hollywood (2010). Engaging with...
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Toby Green, "The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa (U Chicago Press, 2025) by Professor Toby Green tells the extraordinary story of seventeenth-century West African slave trader Crispina Peres to explore the shifting, sophisticated world in which…
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Jorge Marco and Gutmaro Gomez Bravo, "The Fabric of Fear: Building Franco's New Society in Spain, 1936-1950" (Liverpool UP, 2023)
Jorge Marco and Gutmaro Gomez Bravo's book The Fabric of Fear: Building Franco's New Society in Spain, 1936-1950 (Liverpool UP, 2023) deals comprehensively with the process of Francoist state- and nation-building in Spain. Franco's chosen tools were mass repression and cleansing, undertaken both...
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Giles Tremlett, "El Generalísimo: A Biography of Francisco Franco" (Oxford UP, 2025)
From a scrawny, overlooked military graduate to the youngest general in Europe, Francisco Franco was known for his ambition, talent and calculated risk-taking. Yet his reputation remains a topic of fierce debate. Did he destroy Spain and stifle its democracy or rescue the nation from left-wing...
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Danielle Alesi, "Eating Animals in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Consuming Empire, 1492-1700" (Taylor & Francis, 2025)
Eating Animals in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Consuming Empire, 1492-1700 (Amsterdam University Press, 2025) by Dr. Danielle Alesi examines how the perceived edibility of animals evolved during the colonization of the Americas. Early European colonizers ate a variety of animals in the...
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Shlomo Pereira, "Monuments de Papel E Pergaminho: Hebrew Printing in Portugal at the End of the 15th Century" (Chabad Portugal Press, 2025)
Rabbi Professor Shomo Pereira discussed his book "Monuments of Paper and Parchment: Hebrew Printing in Portugal in the Late 15th Century." He explained that while Portugal lacks physical Jewish monuments due to natural disasters, earthquakes, and persecution, the book highlights the country's…
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Yolanda Aixelà-Cabré, "African Women’s Histories in European Narratives: The Afropolitan Krio Fernandino Diaspora (1850-1996)" (Leuven UP, 2025)
Little is known about the African women who came to Europe from the 1870s onwards, nor do we dare to imagine them as wealthy, elegantly dressed individuals with refined tastes and fluent in several languages. The Krio Fernandino represented a multisited, multilocal, transnational…
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Tim Seiter, "Wrangling Pelicans: Military Life in Texas Presidios" (U Texas Press, 2025)
A richly detailed history of daily life for colonial Spanish soldiers surviving on the eighteenth-century Texas Gulf Coast. In 1775, Spanish King Carlos III ordered the capture of American pelicans for his wildlife park in Madrid. The command went to the only Spanish fort on the Texas...
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Vanesa Rodríguez-Galindo, "Madrid on the Move: Feeling Modern and Visually Aware in the Nineteenth Century" (Manchester UP, 2021)
In her new book Madrid on the Move: Feeling Modern and Visually Aware in the Nineteenth Century (Manchester UP, 2021), Vanesa Rodríguez-Galindo explains how the modernization of this great city shaped and was shaped by print media and mass culture. A growing population, industrial immigration…
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Rick A López, "Rooted in Place: Botany, Indigeneity, and Art in the Construction of Mexican Nature, 1570-1914" (U Arizona Press, 2025)
Since the first moment of conquest, colonizers and the colonized alike in Mexico confronted questions about what it meant to be from this place, what natural resources it offered, and who had the right to control those resources and on what basis. Focusing on the ways people, environment, and...
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Ada Ferrer, "Cuba: An American History" (Scribner, 2021)
“No country is ever just one thing.” In her new book Cuba: An American History (Scribner, 2021), NYU historian Ada Ferrer shows this again and again. In clear and engaging prose, Ferrer narrates five centuries of history from a decidedly different angle than previous one-volume studies; the main...
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Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio, "Shipping Sculptures from Early Modern Italy: The Mechanics, Costs, Risks, and Rewards" (Brepols, 2025)
Shipping Sculptures from Early Modern Italy: The Mechanics, Costs, Risks, and Rewards (Brepols, 2025) by Dr. Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio focuses on enormous amounts of sculptures moved from Italy to Spain from ca. 1500-1750. An analysis of an important body of unpublished archival documentation...
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Adrian Pole, "Making Antifascist War: The International Brigades' Transnational Encounters with Civil-War Spain, 1936-1939" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Making Antifascist War: The International Brigades' Transnational Encounters with Civil-War Spain, 1936-1939 (Cambridge UP, 2025) is a study of the 35,000 antifascists who joined the International Brigades in order to defend the Second Spanish Republic and of their encounters with civil-war…
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Martin Austin Nesvig, "The Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
The Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Cambridge UP, 2025) by Dr. Martin Austin Nesvig tells the stories of women from Spain, North Africa, Senegambia, and Canaries accused of sorcery in sixteenth-century Mexico for adapting native magic and healing...
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Brian A. Stauffer, "Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico’s Religionero Rebellion" (U New Mexico Press, 2019)
In Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico’s Religionero Rebellion (University of New Mexico Press, 2019), Brian A. Stauffer reconstructs the history of Mexico's forgotten "Religionero" rebellion of 1873-1877, an armed Catholic challenge to the government of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. An…
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Raymond Jonas, "Habsburgs on the Rio Grande: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire" (Harvard UP, 2024)
For a few years in the middle of the nineteenth century, Mexico was ruled by an Austrian and defended by a French army. This often neglected story is more than just historical trivia - it's a way of understanding 19th century imperial politics, and global insurgencies today. In Habsburgs on the…
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Giles Tremlett, "The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
When civil war broke out in Spain in 1936, tens of thousands of young men and women from across the world flocked there to fight against the Nationalist uprising. Though their history has been told before, Giles Tremlett’s The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War...
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Sasha D. Pack, "The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border" (Stanford UP, 2019)
In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between space—from “shatter zone” to borderland. Far from the centers of authority of contending empires, the...
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Christopher Clarey, "The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay" (Grand Central Publishing, 2025)
In The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay (Grand Central Publishing, 2025) Christopher Clarey illuminates the skill and determination it took to accomplish Rafael Nadal’s most mind-blowing achievement: 14 French Open titles. Nadal has won big on tennis's many surfaces en route to...
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Julia McClure, "Empire of Poverty: The Moral-Political Economy of the Spanish Empire" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Empire of Poverty: The Moral-Political Economy of the Spanish Empire (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Julia McClure examines how changing concepts of poverty in the long-sixteenth century helped shape the deep structures of states and empires and the contours of imperial inequalities. While...
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Emily Colbert Cairns and Nieves Romero-Diaz, "Early Modern Maternities in the Iberian Atlantic" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)
Emily Colbert Cairns of Salve Regina University and Nieves Romero-Díaz of Mount Holyoke join Jana Byars to talk about Early Modern Maternities in the Iberian Atlantic (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). It is the first volume to emphasize women's personal experiences and their life trajectories…
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Rochelle Rojas, "Bad Christians and Hanging Toads: Witch Crafting in Northern Spain, 1525–1675" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Bad Christians and Hanging Toads: Witch Crafting in Northern Spain, 1525–1675 (Cornell University Press, 2025) by Dr. Rochelle Rojas tells riveting stories of witchcraft in everyday life in early modern Navarra. Belief in witchcraft not only emerged in moments of mass panic but was woven into the...
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Stephanie Schmidt, "Child Martyrs and Militant Evangelization in New Spain: Missionary Narratives, Nahua Perspectives" (U Texas Press, 2025)
A cornerstone of the evangelization of early New Spain was the conversion of Nahua boys, especially the children of elites. They were to be emissaries between Nahua society and foreign missionaries, hastening the transmission of the gospel. Under the tutelage of Franciscan friars, the boys also...
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Yolanda Aixelà-Cabré, "Spain’s African Colonial Legacies: Morocco and Equatorial Guinea Compared" (Brill, 2022)
The African cities of Bata and Al-Hoceima were created during the Spanish colonial rule of Equatorial Guinea and Morocco. Spain’s African Colonial Legacies: Morocco and Equatorial Guinea Compared (Brill, 2022) constructs their local history to analyse how Spanish colonialism worked, what its...
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Donald S. Prudlo, "Stimulus Pastorum: A Charge to Pastors" (St. Augustine's Press, 2022)
The work of St. Bartholomew of Braga, O.P. (1514-1590) appears here in English for the first time despite its long and enduring influence in ecclesiastical circles. His meditations on the office of pastor have provided critical insight bishops since their initial circulation and have helped form...
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Fernando Collantes, "Milk in Spain and the History of Diet Change: The Political Economy of Dairy Consumption Since 1950" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
In barely three generations the Spanish diet has changed beyond recognition. The traditional concerns around nutritional health and scarcity have been mostly left behind, but they have given way to new problems linked to excess. In Milk in Spain and the History of Diet Change: The Political…
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Elisabeth Bolorinos Allard, "Spanish National Identity, Colonial Power, and the Portrayal of Muslims and Jews During the Rif War (1909-27)" (Boydell & Brewer, 2021)
How were Moroccan Muslim and Jewish cultures depicted in Spanish literature, journalism, and photography during the Rif War and what did this portrayal reveal about conflicting visions of Spanish identity? Runner-up for the 2017-18 AHGBI-Spanish Embassy Publication Prize Spanish National…
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Adelina Stefan, "Vacationing in Dictatorships: International Tourism in Socialist Romania and Franco's Spain" (Cornell UP, 2024)
Vacationing in Dictatorships: International Tourism in Socialist Romania and Franco's Spain (Cornell UP, 2024) examines the political effects of international tourism in socialist Romania and Francoist Spain in the postwar era. Despite sharp economic and political differences between the two...
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Josef Stern, "Maimonides' "Guide of the Perplexed" in Translation: A History from the Thirteenth Century to the Twentieth" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
There is a common misconception that the Jewish religion does not believe in an afterlife. While it’s true that Judaism is focused on actions, intentions and thoughts in this life, it also believes in an afterlife, and has a variety of points of view about what happens after death. Today’s guest,...
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Adam Franklin-Lyons, "Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon" (Penn State Press, 2022)
Adam Franklin-Lyons joins Jana Byars to talk about Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon (Penn State Press, 2022). In the late fourteenth century, the medieval Crown of Aragon experienced a series of food crises that created conflict and led to widespread starvation. Adam...
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Jorge Flores, "Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
Portuguese India was tiny—a handful of trading posts and enclaves, centered on the colony of Goa. The Estado da Índia faced the Mughal Empire and the Deccan Sultanates, large Muslim and Persian-based societies that ruled the subcontinent. How did Portuguese India survive? Well, by spying. Jorge...
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Elizabeth King and W. David Todd, "Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend" (Getty, 2023)
Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend (Getty Publications, 2023) tells the singular story of an uncanny, rare object at the cusp of art and science: a 450-year-old automaton known as “the monk.” The walking, gesticulating figure of a friar, in the collection of the...
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Andrew Laird, "Aztec Latin: Renaissance Learning and Nahuatl Traditions in Early Colonial Mexico" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Andrew Laird, of Brown University, discusses Aztec Latin: Renaissance Learning and Nahuatl Traditions in Early Colonial Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2024). In 1536, only fifteen years after the fall of the Aztec empire, Franciscan missionaries began teaching Latin, classical rhetoric, and...
About this show
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com
Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/
Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork
Hosted by
New Books Network