Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Historian Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto argues that Spain’s engineers were critical to how a small and sparsely populated 16th-century country built the largest empire the world had ever seen.

Fernández-Armesto is co-author with research scientist Manuel Lucena Giraldo of How the Spanish Empire was Built. They bring to life the work of the engineers, prospectors, soldiers and priests that went on behind the scenes to build the infrastructure necessary for empire. They say this investment in infrastructure allowed elites to grow wealthy on trade and widened the arc of Spanish influence.

Fernández-Armesto is William P. Reynolds Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is a winner of the World History Association Book Prize, the John Carter Brown Medal, and of Spanish national prizes for geographical research and food writing. His books include Straits and Out of Our Minds.

Part of the festival’s Spanish and Latin American programme of literature and culture and part of the Voices of Europe programme.