EXPEDITION LEADERS

Fernando Cervantes

Fernando is a historian of early modern Europe, with a special interest in the intellectual, cultural and religious history of Spain and Spanish America. Born in Mexico City, where he attended the Jesuit School ‘Instituto Patria’, he moved to the United Kingdom with his family in 1972 and read for a degree in History at Oxford University, graduating in 1981.

He returned to Mexico City, where he attended El Colegio de México as a doctoral student before venturing back to the UK in 1985, where he completed his PhD in Cambridge University in 1989. He joined Bristol University the year after, where he has taught European and Latin American History ever since. He has held visiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, UCLA, UCSB, and the Liguria Study Centre in Bogliasco, Italy.

Fernando has published widely in the intellectual, cultural and religious history of early modern Europe and Spanish America. His most recent book is Conquistadores: A New History which was published in the UK in 2020 and the USA in 2021. The book has been translated into eight languages and offers an enlightening, and often revisionist viewpoint of the conquistadors and the world from which they emerged.