Honourable Mention in the Eleanor Tufts Awards (Society for Iberian Global Art) for Dr Laura Fernández-González (School of History and Heritage)

Dr Laura Fernández-González’s Philip II of Spain and the Architecture of Empire (Penn State University Press,2021) has been commended with an honourable mention in the Eleanor Tufts Awards. The award was established in 1992 by the Society for Iberian Global Art (formerly American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies) and recognizes an outstanding English-language book in the area of Spanish or Portuguese art history.

On Philip II of Spain and the Architecture of Empire the committee wrote:

It is an original work in which the author focuses on the circulation of visual culture during Philip II’s reign and his role as a promoter of certain architectural designs. Comparing materials which have never been compared before and using digital tools to reconstruct some spaces, this book makes an interesting new contribution to the scholarly conversation on Philip II’s reign.

This is the first book published on this topic for over 20 years and the first to examine architectural exchange in the Iberian world during Philip II of Spain’s reign. It uses a range of case studies to analyse ideas of exchange between colonial and European centres, in line with current debates on global architectural history. This approach has led, inter alia, to a commissioned essay for ‘Constructing Race and Architecture’, the second Roundtable on the theme that has been published by the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.

Laura is developing this comparative approach in her next book project that explores the architecture of key early modern ‘ports of the Indies’. Tentatively entitled Entangled Imperial Cities of the Early Modern Iberian World, this book examines architectural development in Lisbon, Seville, Old Goa and Havana and will discuss indigenous contributions and the circulation of design trends in the Iberian World. The comparative analysis of the major urban development of these cities is novel and challenges current understandings of the centre-periphery dynamic in the field. Research travel for these projects has been funded by the British Academy/ Leverhulme Trust Small Research Grants, and the Edilia and François-Auguste de Montêquin Senior Scholar Fellowship, awarded by the Society of Architectural Historians (US).

Dr Laura Fernández-González is a historian of architecture and urbanism and Senior Lecturer in Architectural History at the School of History and Heritage. She is the current Programme Leader for the Art History programme and the coordinator of the Global and Transregional Studies Research group in the College of Arts (www.lincoln.ac.uk/hh/research/globalandtransregionalstudies/).

Story submitted by Laura Fernandez Gonzalez
lfernandezgonzalez@lincoln.ac.uk