About the Project

Historias is a Spanish history podcast.  Each monthly episode is an interview with a historian on a particular topic in Spanish history.  Topics vary widely from ancient to modern times and may consider any part of the Iberian peninsula as well as the empires of any Iberian state.  Each episode maintains a high level of academic rigor while keeping the conservation accessible to the general public.  The primary language of the podcast is English, but some episodes are also in Spanish.

The purpose of the Historias podcast is to broaden the diffusion of the latest research on Spanish history and to promote dialogue between scholars across disciplinary, period and national boundaries.  The podcast’s name symbolizes these goals because “historias” means both “histories” and “stories” in Spanish.  The project aims to let scholars share their own perspectives and interpretations of the past, thus presenting different “histories,” while doing so through informal conversations that relate these interpretations as interesting “stories.”

About the Host

Foster Chamberlin is a visiting assistant professor of humanities at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey.  He holds a Ph.D. in modern European history from the University of California- San Diego.  His research concerns military culture and political violence in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Spain.  His dissertation, “Honor Bound: The Military Culture of the Civil Guard and the Political Violence of the Spanish Second Republic, 1931-1936,” explored how the military culture of Spain’s gendarmerie, the Civil Guard, contributed to making it the most violent profession of the Second Republic period that immediately preceded the Civil War.  He has been the recipient of J. William Fulbright and Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowships.  Outside of academia, Foster enjoys surfing, hiking, camping, travelling and drinking craft beer.  His personal website is fchamberlin.weebly.com.