Established in January 2019, and generously supported by the Faculty of History and Exeter College, the Iberian History Seminar is an international research seminar that takes place on Wednesdays of the even weeks in term time in the Rector’s Drawing Room of Exeter College. It is currently convened by Natasha Bailey, Erica Feild-Marchello, Giuseppe Marcocci, Glyn Redworth, and Cecilia Tarruell. Invited speakers give a 50-minute talk followed by Q&A. The seminar welcomes presentations of work in progress, emerging hypotheses, and open questions as it is understood to be a space where new ideas can be tested, challenged and thrive.
Privileged but not exclusive topics for discussion include the history of the Iberian kingdoms and the global empires of Spain and Portugal from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, cross-cultural interactions in the Iberian world, and the agency of religious, ethnic and gendered minorities in the Iberian past.
Every year a joint session with a network of four Portuguese history centres (CHAM, Lisbon; CHSC, Coimbra; CIDEHUS, Evora; and ICS, Lisbon) is hosted in Oxford and other joint initiatives have been organised with the European University Institute, the Instituto Cervantes in London, the Latin American Centre at the University of Oxford, and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
