Senior Academic Awarded Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship

1 June 2022

Written by: hgamble

Dr Laura Fernández-González, Senior Lecturer in Architectural History at the University of Lincoln, UK, has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship for 2022-23, the first such award in the University’s School of History and Heritage.

Dr Laura Fernández-González, Senior Lecturer in Architectural History at the University of Lincoln, UK, has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship for 2022-23, the first such award in the University’s School of History and Heritage.

A prestigious and highly competitive fellowship programme, the Leverhulme Trust Fellowship Award is a recognition of Dr Fernández-González scholarly contributions to the global histories of architecture and urbanism in the early modern period.

Dr Fernández-González’s research draws on the approaches of global architectural, social, and art histories that aim to de-centre our understanding of the early modern world and intersects with existing attempts to balance Western and non-Western architectural histories. She will now continue to work on her current project ‘Global Iberia: Architecture and Empire in the Early Modern ‘Ports of the Indies’.

Further recognition has been forthcoming with Dr Fernández-González’s most recent monograph commended with an international award. Philip II of Spain and the Architecture of Empire, published by Penn State University Press in May 2021, was awarded an Honourable Mention in the Eleanor Tufts 2022 awards.

The Eleanor Tufts Award was established in 1992 by the Society for Iberian Global Art (SIGA), formerly the American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies, to recognise outstanding English-language books in the areas of Spanish or Portuguese art history.

Dr Laura Fernández-González said: “I’m thrilled and grateful that the Leverhulme Trust has awarded me a Research Fellowship for the 2022-23 academic year.

“This fellowship will afford me the time to focus on my current book project, namely, a transregional comparative analysis of key city ports of the early modern Iberian world.”

As the first comparative analysis of architecture in four key ports of the Indies, namely, Seville, Havana, Lisbon and Goa, Dr Fernández-González’s project will contribute to existing studies on early modern circulations and challenge our understanding of centre/periphery dynamics in the period. The study will give clarity around the circulation of architectural knowledge and how this has been transformed by local conditions.

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