José Medeiros Ferreira Lecture

Inaugural Lecture of the PhD Program in History | Academic Year 2025–2026

On the upcoming 26th at 6 p.m., the PhD program in History at NOVA FCSH will be inaugurated with a lecture by Professor Alejandro García Sanjuán, entitled “La Reconquista en el debate público y académico actual”. The lecture is intended for PhD students but is open to all those interested, and everyone is warmly invited to attend.

Abstract

Widely developed in Spain as an academic concept since the 19th century, the notion of Reconquista carried from the outset a strong ideological weight, by promoting a markedly exclusionary vision of Spanish identity as a nation forged against Islam. Although it has now lost the academic hegemony it exercised until the end of the Franco dictatorship, the subsequent revival of the concept’s more toxic version, within the framework of the Clash of Civilizations doctrine, has generated in Spanish medievalism a debate in which various perspectives—addressed here—can be distinguished.

Biography

Alejandro García-Sanjuán is a Full Professor of Medieval History at the University of Huelva (Spain). His main field of research is the medieval Iberian Peninsula, with particular focus on al-Andalus. His major publications include Till God Inherits the Earth. Islamic Pious Endowments in al-Andalus (9th–15th century) (Brill, 2007); La conquista islámica de la península ibérica y la tergiversación del pasado: del catastrofismo al negacionismo (Marcial Pons, 2013, awarded the Drouin Prize of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Paris); and Yihad. La regulación de la guerra en la doctrina islámica clásica (Marcial Pons, 2020). He has also co-edited, with M. Fierro, Hispania, Al-Andalus y España: identidad y nacionalismo en la historia peninsular (Marcial Pons, 2020), and with H. Fancy, What Was the Islamic Conquest of Iberia? Understanding the New Debate (Routledge, 2021). More recently, he edited The Taifa Kingdoms: Reconsidering 11th-Century Iberia (De Gruyter-Brill, 2025). He has been a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2019), and Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at the University of Leicester (2023). He currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies (Taylor & Francis) and Hispania (CSIC, Madrid).