Simon Park

Cultural historian Professor Simon Park looks at the early age of imperialism with a fresh eye and finds an age of shipwrecks and marooned Europeans that reflected empires built on luck more than swashbuckling adventures.

Park says the 15th and 16th centuries were marked by a series of failures. Columbus suffered many shipwrecks and died trying to persuade the world that America was China. Vasco da Gama was known as the first European to reach India, but was actually guided across the Indian Ocean by a Gujrati pilot. Park says by looking at the disasters and the characters involved we get a new and exciting take on a foundational period of history.

Park is associate professor of medieval and renaissance Portuguese at the University of Oxford and an expert in the literature and material culture of the early modern world.