Episode 52 with Katie Harris and Pamela Radcliff
As part of our Historias for BSPHS series, in this episode we interview Katie Harris and Pamela Radcliff, the editors of a new special issue of the Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies entitled New Currents in Iberian History, about the divisions that they noticed in the field of Iberian history when editing this issue and how recent work is attempting to bridge these gaps. We’ll explore the temporal and spatial boundaries within the field as well as the innovative new approaches that historians are taking to studying questions of race and gender in particular in the Iberian Peninsula and beyond.
The Episode
The Guests
A. Katie Harris is an associate professor of history at the University of California Davis. Her research centers on cultural and religious history in Spain and the larger early modern Spanish world, from the Mediterranean to the Americas and beyond. In her new book, The Stolen Bones of St. John of Matha: Forgery, Theft, and Sainthood in the Seventeenth Century (coming Fall 2023 from Penn State University Press), Harris explored the 1655 theft of the bones of San Juan de Mata, founder of the Order of the Most Holy Trinity for the Redemption of Captives, and the problem of relic identity and authentication in early modern Catholicism. Her previous book, From Muslim to Christian Granada: Inventing a City’s Past in Early Modern Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), examined the crafting of civic identity in connection with the lead books of the Sacromonte, a collection of bogus relics and accompanying forged documents that were discovered in Granada, Spain, in the late sixteenth century.
Pamela Radcliff is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, San Diego, where she has also served as Chair. She received her B.A. from Scripps College (1979) and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University (1990). She is the author of several books and numerous articles on popular mobilization, gender and women’s politics and civil society in 20th century Spain. She has published three single-authored books: From Mobilization to Civil War: the Politics of Polarization in the Spanish City of Gijon, Making Democratic Citizens in Spain: Civil Society and the Popular Origins of the Transition, 1960-1978 and the History of Modern Spain, 1808-Present.
Works Cited
In addition to the articles in the BSPHS special issue New Currents in Iberian History, the following works are mentioned in the episode (in order of appearance):
- Ringrose, David. Spain, Europe and the “Spanish Miracle” 1700-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
- Burdiel, Isabel. “Myths of Failure, Myths of Success: New Perpectives on Nineteenth-Century Spanish Liberalism.” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 4 (Dec. 1998): 892-912.
- Casanova, Julián. República y Guerra Civil. Vol. 8 of Historia de España, directed by Josep Fontana and Ramón Villares. Madrid: Crítica/Marcial Pons, 2007.
- Carr, Raymond. Spain 1808-1939. Oxford University Press, 1966.
- Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. Empire and Anti-slavery: Spain, Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1833-1874. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999.
- Eastman, Scott. A Missionary Nation: Race, Religion, and Spain’s Age of Liberal Imperialism, 1841-1881. University of Nebraska Press, 2021.
- Morcillo, Aurora. True Catholic Womanhood: Gender Ideology in Franco’s Spain. Northern Illinois University Press, 2000.
- Goode, Joshua. Impurity of Blood: Defining Race in Spain, 1870-1930. LSU Press, 2009.
- Green, Toby, Philip J. Havik, and Filipa Ribeiro da Silva. African Voices from the Inquisition. Vol. 1, the Trial of Crispina Peres of Cacheu, Guinea-Bissau (1646-1668). Oxford: British Academy, Oxford University Press, 2021.
Historias 