Santa Clara University

My teaching and research interests focus on Spain's medieval and early modern political, maritime, and legal  interaction with its neighbors and the world after 1492. Apart from survey courses on European history, I currently teach classes on the history of piracy, ethnobotany, and sexuality, concentrating on the European and Islamic Mediterranean and the "New World" influenced by Iberian societies. The latest course I have developed, entitled "Spain and Morocco, 700-1700," explores the history of al-Andalus and the Maghrib, specifically the origins and demise of the culture of coexistence or convivencia which characterized Jewish, Christian and Muslim life in the Western Mediterranean until the 1500s. My most recent research interests have led to  publications investigating the impact of pre-Columbian Native American science on the development of sixteenth-century European botany, the odd and disastrous naval alliance pursued by Spain's Catholic monarchy with Protestant England and Holland in the seventeenth century, and a fascinating case study of Spanish imperial entanglement with worldwide piracy in the 1690s.