Dr Laura Fernández-González is a Senior Lecturer in Architectural History at the School of History and Heritage, University of Lincoln, UK. She is also the founder and coordinator of the Global and Transregional Studies research group and director of the BA Art History and History Programme. Laura has been a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Social Sciences – University of Lisbon (2019), the Oficina del Historiador in Havana (2019), the University Jaume I, Spain (2013) and Wellesley College, USA (2011). Prior to her arrival in Lincoln in 2015, she lectured in the architectural history and conservation programmes at the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. She has also held postdoctoral fellowships at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Portugal and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Laura has studied in Seville (BA Hons and MA), Madrid (Pg-Dip) and in Edinburgh, where she graduated with a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. Before embarking on doctoral research she was a Research Assistant for an AHRC-funded project at Newcastle University (UK). Laura also worked professionally in architectural and urban conservation in Spain.

Laura is art and architectural historian of the early modern Iberian world. He book Philip II of Spain and the Architecture of Empire (Penn State University Press, 2021) is the first on Philip II and architecture to be published in over 20 years. Laura explores a range of case studies that has enabled her to analyse ideas of exchange between colonial and European centres, in line with current debates on global art history. Previous scholarship focusing on Philip’s reign and the arts has been Eurocentric. Thus, her book shines new light into our understanding of visual and cultural circulations. The research approach taken in her book has led, inter alia, to a commissioned essay for ‘Constructing Race and Architecture’, a special issue of the

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (forthcoming, December 2021). Laura has also co-edited with Professor Fernando Checa Cremades a book entitled Festival Culture in the World of the Spanish Habsburgs (Routledge, 2015). Festival Culture centres on rituals in the Spanish empire and challenges the European-colonial conceptual division in scholarship. The volume has been praised for making a ‘significant contribution to several areas of study’ (Sixteenth Century Journal) that ‘opens promising paths for future research.’(Renaissance Quarterly).She has edited a second volume with Dr Marjorie entitled ‘Visual and Spatial Hybridity in the Early Modern Iberian World’ Special Issue, Renaissance Studies (Sept 2020); this volume is composed of eights articles centred on the arts and cultures of Latin America, Asia and Europe. Laura has been PI and Co-I to a number of national and international research projects and her work has been published in leading presses and journals in the field, (eg. Penn State University Press, Routledge, Renaissance Studies, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians among others). Laura has studied and undertaken extensive fieldwork in Goa in India, Cuba in the Caribbean and in Europe. She is currently at work on two book projects that examine comparatively the architecture, arts and material worlds of some the main early modern ‘ports of the Indies’, namely, Seville, Havana, Lisbon and Goa.