Department of History
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Dr Fernando Cervantes
Reader in History
Office: G47, 11 Woodland Rd: Consultation hours (PDF)
Phone: +44 (0)117 928 7933
Email: f.cervantes@bristol.ac.uk
Research interests
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 the two major outputs of the project: a co-authored monograph, and a co-edited collection of essays entitled Angels, Demons and the New World, to be published by Cambridge University Press. 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, the relations between Christianity, Judaism and Islam, 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.
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.
Selected publications
- The Devil in the New World: the impact of diabolism in New Spain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1994).
- Angels, Demons and the New World, ed. with A. Redden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
- Spiritual Encounters: Interactions between Christianity and Native Religions in Colonial America, ed. with N. Griffiths (Birmingham and Nebraska, 1999).
- 'Cervantes in Italy: Christian Humanism and the Visual Impact of Renaissance Rome', Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 66, no. 3 (July 2005), pp. 325-350.
- “The Devils of Querétaro: Scepticism and Credulity in late seventeenth-century Mexico”, Past and Present no.130 (February 1991).
- “Christianity and the Indians in Early Modern Mexico”, Historical Research no. 160 (June, 1993).
Full publications
Full list of Dr Cervantes' publications since 1990 as held in the University's IRIS publications database.
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