Carlos de Ayala Martínez has a PhD in Medieval History from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (1985), where he is currently the head professor of Medieval History. His lines of research include the reign of King Alfonso X of Castile, the Hispanic military orders and the problems involved with the Crusade and holy war on the Iberian Peninsula, as well as their implications in the monarchy’s political legitimacy. He has had several monographs and collaborative works published on these subjects at congresses and in specialized journals, as well as running various research and development projects. Some of his latest publications are: Origins and Development of Holy War on the Iberian Peninsula: Words and images for a legitimization (10th-14th centuries), with Patrick Henriet and J. Santiago Palacios (published by Casa de Velázquez, 2016); Military Orders, Monarchy and Spirituality in the Kingdoms of Castile and Leon (12th-13th centuries) (University of Granada, 2015), and Christians Against Muslims in the Middle Ages of the Iberian Peninsula: Ideological and doctrinarian foundations of a confrontation (10th-14th centuries), with Isabel Cristina F. Fernandes (Edições Colibri, 2015).

Luis F. Bernabé Pons is a tenured professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at the Department of Integrated Philologies of the University of Alicante. His main lines of research focus on Arab Literature, the influence of the Arab-Islamic factor in Spanish literature and the history and culture of the Mudejars and Moriscos. In this last field, he has especially taken an interest in “aljamiado” (Spanish written in Arabic script) and Morisco literature, the Moriscos after being expelled from Spain, the cultural level of the Mudejars and Moriscos, and the attempts at Morisco intervention in Christian thought (the “Leaden Books of the Sacromonte” and St. Barnaby’s Gospel). At present, he is the director of the “Sharq Al-Andalus” Arab and Islamic Studies Research Group at the University of Alicante. He has been a visiting professor at the Universities of La Manouba (Tunisia, 2007), Algiers (Algeria, 2009), Madison (Wisconsin, USA, 2011) and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil, 2012); a guest researcher at the School of Higher Studies in Paris (France, 2010) and a Norman McColl Lecturer at Cambridge University (Great Britain, 2011). Some of his most notable recent publications include: “On Morisco networks and collectives” in Kevin Ingram (eds.), The Converts and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond (E.J. Brill, 2012); Los moriscos: conflicto, expulsión y diáspora (The Moriscos: Conflict, expulsion and diaspora, published by Los Libros de la Catarata, 2009), and Identidad y cohesión, exclusión y expulsión de los moriscos de España (Identity and Cohesion, Exclusion and Expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain, published by Hesperia Culturas del Mediterráneo, number 13, 2009).

Fernando Bravo López has a PhD from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM). He has been a researcher at the Universities of Castilla-La Mancha and Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He is the author of the book En casa ajena: bases intelectuales del antisemitismo y la islamofobia (In Another’s House: Intellectual foundations of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, published by Bellaterra, 2012), and articles published in international journals, such as “Ethnic and Racial Studies, Patterns of Prejudice o Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations.” At present, he is the main researcher on the project “Islamophobia: Continuity and change in the anti-Muslim tradition” (UAM).

Julio Escalona is a scientist working for the CSIC, in the Department of Medieval Studies at the Institute of History, as well as an Honorary Senior Research Associate with the Archeology Institute at the University College of London. He earned a PhD at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 1996. 

His research is based on using a combination of history and archeology to study the European societies of the High and Central Middle Ages, following two main guidelines: studying the relationship between territory, society and power in medieval Europe, and analyzing the written medieval sources from the perspective of historical memory, political discourse and document forgery. He has taken part in many different domestic and foreign financed research projects, including the management of four projects in Spain’s National Research, Development and Innovation Plan. Among his most important publications, one could highlight: Chartes et cartulaires comme instruments de pouvoir. Espagne et Occident chrétien (VIIIe-XIIe siècles) (Charts and Cartularies as Tools of Power: 8th to 12th centuries, Editions Méridiennes - CSIC, 2013), with Hélène Sirantoine (eds.); Épica y falsificaciones documentales en la Castilla medieval (Epics and Document Forgeries in Medieval Castile) in Antigüedad y cristianismo: Monografías históricas sobre la Antigüedad tardía 29, 2012, and Scale and Scale Change in the Early Middle Ages: Exploring landscape, local society and the world beyond (Brepols Publishers NV, 2011), with Andrew Reynolds (eds.).

Antoni Furió is a professor of Medieval History at the University of Valencia. He has been a guest professor at the Universities of Paris-Sorbonne, Toulouse, Oxford and Stanford and at the School of Higher Social Sciences Studies in Paris. For thirteen years, he directed the publications of the University of Valencia (PUV) and was the president of the Association of Spanish University Publishers (AEUE). As a researcher, his work has revolved mainly around the economic and social history of the Middle Ages, and in particular on the construction of the new feudal Christian order after the conquest and destruction of the Muslim society of Al-Andalus. However, he has also shown an interest in historiographical, political and cultural matters. Amongst his most recent works, one could highlight  Las Españas medievales (The Medieval Spains, published in Historia de las Españas. Una aproximación crítica; Tirant Humanidades, 2015), published by himself along with Joan Romero; La primera gran depresión europea (siglos XIV y XV) (The First Great European Depression: 14th and 15th centuries,” in España en crisis. Las grandes depresiones económicas, 1348-2012 (Pasado y presente, 2013), and Jaime I: entre la historia y la leyenda (Jaime I: Between history and legend, Bromera, 2007).

Mercedes García-Arenal is a professor of Research at the Superior Council of Scientific Research (CSIC) in Madrid. Ms. García-Arenal is a cultural historian of the Muslim West (Islam on the Iberian Peninsula and in the Maghreb region) during the initial stage of the Modern Era. She has written numerous publications on religious minorities, including Mudejars and Moriscos in Christianity, the Inquisition and Jews in Islamic lands. She has placed special attention on the processes of conversion, Messianism and Millenarianism, as well as the study of saints and mysticism. Her work has above all focused on the relations between religions, cultural transmission, forced conversions and their consequences for both minorities and the majority of society in Iberia. At present, she is a professor of Research in the CORPI Project, ERC Advanced Grant 2012. Some of her most notable recent publications include: After Conversion: Iberia and the emergence of Modernity (Leiden Brill, 2016); Los moriscos, expulsión y diáspora. Una perpectiva internacional (The Moriscos, Expulsion and Diaspora: One perspective, Universidad de Valencia, 2013), with Gerard Wiegers; Un Oriente español: los moriscos del Sacromonte en tiempos de Contrarreforma, Madrid (A Spanish Orient: The Moriscos of the Sacromonte in times of the Counter-reformation, Marcial Pons, 2010), with Fernando Rodriguez Mediano.

Luis Agustín García Moreno has a degree in Classical Philology (1971) from the University of Granada and a PhD in Classical Philology (1972) from the University of Salamanca, as well as being a doctor honoris causa from the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo (Argentina, 2008). Since 1979, he has been a professor of Ancient History, working at the University of Alcalá since 1982. At present, he is a Numerary Member (Medal 36) of the Royal History Academy. García Moreno is the author of 349 scientific publications, amongst which we highlight some of the most recent: España 702-719. La conquista musulmana (Spain 702-719: The Muslim conquest, University of Seville, 2013); biographies of all the Visigoth kings in the Diccionario biográfico español (Spanish Biographical Dictionary, Real Academia de la Historia, 2009-2013); De Gerión a César. Estudios históricos y filológicos de la España indígena y Romano-republicana (From Geryon to Caesar: Historical and philological studies on indigenous and Republican Roman Spain, University of Alcalá, 2001). 

José Antonio González Alcantud is a professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Granada, the director of the Observatory of Cultural Prospecting at the University of Granada and a member of the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of Spain. Some of his notable recent works are: La Alhambra, mito y vida, 1930-1990 (The Alhambra, Myth and Life, University of Granada, 2016), Travesías estéticas. Etnografiando la literatura y las artes (Aesthetic Crossings: Ethnographies of literature and the arts, University of Granada, 2015) and El mito de al Ándalus. Orígenes y actualidad de un ideal cultural (The Myth of Al-Andalus: Origins and present of a cultural ideal, Almuzara, 2014). 

Felipe Maíllo Salgado, accredited as a professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Salamanca (2008), retired in 2011 after 32 years teaching, having been awarded the “María de Maeztu” Prize for excellence in research (2010). He continues belonging to the age-old institution of the Claustro de Doctores at his university. Holder of a degree in Geography and History (with a specialization in History, for which he earned high honors) and degrees in Hispanic Philology from the University of Salamanca and Semitic Philology (specializing in Arabic) from the University of Granada, he later received a scholarship to study Arabic and Islamic Law at the University of Cairo, as well as other schools. A guest professor for 25 years at the University of Buenos Aires, and at the Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero and Conicet in Argentina, he is listed as an expert at the National Agency of Evaluation and Prospecting (ANEP) within the research, development and innovation management system. He has had more than 20 books published, along with nearly one hundred articles on Arab and Islamic topics. Some of his most notable recent works are: “Islamic Historiography for the History of the Iberian Peninsula,” in Christians and Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula: War, border and co-existence. (Fundación Sánchez Albornoz, 2009); “History’s Construction Through Islam,” in Anales de historia antigua, medieval y moderna number 41, 2009; and On the Disappearance of Al-Andalus (Abada, 2004)

Eduardo Manzano is a professor of Research at the Institute of History, within the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Madrid. From 2006 through 2012, he was the director of the CSIC’s Center of Human and Social Sciences and a member of the Executive Board of the Consortium for Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI). He has been a Research Visitor Fellow at Oxford University’s St. John’s College and the Tinker Professor at the University of Chicago’s Center for Latin American Studies. He holds a PhD in Medieval History from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and an MA in Area Studies from the School of Eastern and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. His research has focused on the history of Al-Andalus, particularly during the Umayyad period. He has also worked on the political implications of social history and the concept of historical memory. Similarly, he has made very significant contributions on the history of Jerusalem during World War I. At present, he is preparing a study on the Cordoba caliphate during the era of Al-Hakam II. Some of his most notable recent works are: “Why did Islamic Medieval institutions become so different from Western Medieval institutions?,” in Medieval Worlds I, 2015; “How Arabs Really Invaded Hispania,” al-Qanṭara 35, 1, 2014; “The Ḥisba, the Muḥtasib and the Struggle over Political Power and a Moral Economy. An Enquiry into Institutions,” with S. Narotzki, in J. Hudson and A. Rodríguez, Divergent Paths. The Shapes of Power and Institutions in Medieval Islam and Christendom (Brill, 2014).

Iñaki Martín Viso is a tenured professor of Medieval History at the University of Salamanca and belongs to the Research Group for the Late and High Middle Ages in Hispania. He has a PhD in History from the same university, has worked at the UNED and at the University of Coimbra (Portugal) and was a Ramón y Cajal contract holder in the Department of Medieval, Modern and Contemporary History of the University of Salamanca. His research has revolved around the construction of rural landscapes in the northwestern Iberian Peninsula from the fifth to eleventh centuries and on political articulation, above all the relations between central authority and local powers during the same time period. He has studied aspects such as the role of the tombs excavated in stone, high fortified sites, the organization of territories and the meaning of written and numbered slates. He is currently running a research project on collapse and regeneration in Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages, studying the case of the northwestern Iberian Peninsula. Some of his most notable recent publications include: “Marks of Power: Slates and peasant villages in the central Iberian Peninsula (5th to 7th centuries)” in Medievalismo: Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Estudios Medievales 25, 2015; “Regional Histories of Re-population: The Asturian-Leonese Kings and ‘land policies’ in the western plateau of the Douro River,” with Álvaro Carvajal, in El historiador y la sociedad: Homenaje al profesor José Mª Mínguez,  Pablo de la Cruz Díaz Martínez, Fernando Luis Corral, Iñaki Martín Viso (coords.), (University of Salamanca, 2013); Dark Times?: Territory and society in the central Iberian Peninsula: (7th to 10th centuries) (coord.) (Silex, 2009)

José Enrique Ruiz-Domènec is a professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona and a visiting professor of Medieval History at the Universidad Suor Orsola Benincasa in Naples. He has been a guest professor at the School of Higher Studies in Paris and at the Universities of Poitiers and Genoa, the Universidad Javeriana de Bogotá and the Universidad Iberoamericana de México. He is a scholar in the Royal Academy of Letters of Barcelona and a history editor for  National Geographic. Forming part of his bibliography related with this colloquium, one could highlight: España, una nueva historia (Spain, a New History, published by RBA, 2011 – 4th ed.); Atardeceres Rojos. Cuatro vidas entre la cristiandad y el Islam (Red Dusks: Four lives between Christianity and Islam, published by Ariel, 2007) and the “prefazione” to Francesco Gabrielli, Storici arabi delle Crociata (Einaudi, 2007).

Rafael Sánchez Saus is a professor of Medieval History at the University of Cadiz and a numerary member of the Spanish-American Royal Academy of Cadiz, of which he was the director from 2006 to 2008, as well as being a member of the Royal Academy of History, the Matritense Academy of Genealogy and Heraldry, the San Dionisio Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Arts and Letters of Jerez de la Frontera and Seville’s Academy of Fine Letters. He was the dean of the School of Philosophy and Letters in Cadiz (2000-2005) and the rector of the Universidad San Pablo CEU in Madrid (2009-2011). With a PhD from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, he is the author of many books and scientific articles regarding the history of Andalusia and Spain in the Middle Ages. Some of his most notable recent publications include: “Al-Andalus and the Cross: Christians under an Islamic regime,” in Clío: Revista de historia 173, 2016; “The Seville of Doña Guiomar Manuel: A medieval example of civic Christian euergetism” (Real Maestranza de Caballería de Sevilla, 2015); and “Elements Making up Memory and Identity Among Medieval Andalusian Nobility,” in Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 210, Cuaderno 2, 2013. He earned the “Culture and Nobility” Research Award given by Seville’s royal equestrian society, the Real Maestranza de Caballería, and the Royal Sevillian Academy of Fine Letters, in the year 2014 edition, for his work titled “The Seville of Doña Guiomar Manuel.” 

Jesús Torrecilla has been a professor of Spanish literature at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) since 1997. With a degree from the University of La Laguna, Torrecilla studied at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, having earned his doctorate from the University of Southern California (USC). From 1991 to 1996, he worked as an assistant professor at Louisiana State University and then went on to become a professor at UCLA. Having specialized in the Spanish literature of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, his fields of research and teaching focus on the process of building national identities, the relationships of power and the concepts of hegemony and marginalization. Most notable among his recent publications are España al revés: los mitos del pensamiento progresista (1790-1840) (Spain Backwards: The myths of progressive thought, Marcial Pons, 2016), Guerras literarias del XVIII español (Literary Wars of the Eighteenth Century in Spain, Universidad de Salamanca, 2008) and España exótica: La formación de la imagen española moderna (Exotic Spain: The formation of the modern Spanish image, Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 2004). In 1998, he received the Lengua de Trapo Fiction Award for one of his novels.

Fernando Rodríguez Mediano is a scientific researcher with the Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean and Near East Institute (ILC) at the Human and Social Sciences Center of the Spanish National Research Council (CCHS-CSIC). With a PhD in Semitic Philology from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (1991), he completed his post-doctoral studies at the School of High Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris (1993-1994). He has been a guest professor at the EHESS in Paris (2001 and 2007) and the Assistant Director of the ILC (formerly the Institute of Philology) at the CSIC from 2002-2011. He was also the director of the journal Al-Qantara and has worked on the history of North Africa, Spanish colonialism in Morocco and European Orientalism in the Modern Era. He has had articles published in journals and international and national collective publications, such as Anales, Revista de Occidente, al-Qantara, Awraq, Studia Islamica and the Journal of Early Modern History. His most recent book, written in collaboration with Mercedes García-Arenal, was translated into English with the title The Orient in Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Some of his latest publications have been: “Sacred Calendars: Calculation of the Hegira as a Historiographical Problem in Early Modern Spain,” in the Journal of Early Modern History 20 (2016) and  “Biblical Translation and Literalness in Early Modern Spain,” in Mercedes García-Arenal (ed.), After Conversion. Iberia and the Emergence of Modernity (Brill, 2016).

Alejandro García Sanjuán has a PhD in Medieval History from the University of Seville (1998) and is a tenured professor of Medieval History at the University of Huelva (since 2008). His preferred field of research focuses on the history of Al-Andalus. Among his preferential lines of work are study of the Islamic legal framework for the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, as well as the way in which the concept of Al-Andalus has been dealt with in contemporary Spanish historiographical and cultural tradition. Among his publications are Co-existence and Conflicts: Religious minorities on the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages (University of Granada, 2015), The Islamic Conquest of the Iberian Peninsula and the Misrepresentation of the Past (Marcial Pons, 2013) and Till God Inherits the Earth: Islamic Pious Endowments in al-Andalus (10th-15th centuries) (Brill, 2007).

A professor of Medieval History at the University of Valladolid and the director of the Simancas History Institute at the same university, Ms. del Val is a member of the Royal History Academy (Spain) and the Portuguese History Academy (Portugal). At present, she is the president of the Spanish Medieval Studies Society (SEEM). Her research has focused on fifteenth-century Castilian society, placing a special emphasis on the figure of Queen Isabella, urban population centers and the role of women. Some of her most notable recent publications include: “Synodal Doctrine with Regard to Moors and Jews: Baptism,” in Rica Amrán and Antonio Cortijo Ocaña’s Minorías en la España medieval y moderna (siglos XV-XVII) (University of California, Santa Barbara, 2016); “Women’s Work Spaces in Fifteenth-century Castile,” Studia Historica. Historia Medieval, 26, 2008, and Queen Isabella and Her Time (University of Granada, 2005).