Alumni Profile

ALUMNUS PROFILE:

Dr. Fidel J. Tavárez

Fidel J. Tavárez is a Provost's Postdoctoral Scholar in History at the University of Chicago. He completed a Ph.D. in history at Princeton University (2016), a B.A. at The City College of New York-CUNY (2011), and an A.A. at LaGuardia Community College-CUNY (2008). During the 2018-2019 academic year, Fidel will hold a Humboldt Research Fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin, and in the fall of 2019, he will transition into a tenure-track position in the Department of History at Queens College-CUNY. At Queens College, Fidel will teach courses in Atlantic, Latin American, and global imperial history.

Broadly speaking, his work traces how Spanish ministers attempted to erect a modern, commercial empire in Spain’s Atlantic territories during the eighteenth century. His book project in progress is titled The Imperial Machine: Assembling the Spanish Commercial Empire in the Age of Enlightenment. Portions of Fidel’s work have appeared in the Journal of Latin American studies, where he published an article titled “Viscardo’s Global Political Economy and the First Cry for Spanish American Independence, 1767-1798.” His latest article, “Colonial Economic Improvement: How Spain Created New Consulados to Preserve and Develop its American Empire, 1778-1795,” is forthcoming in the Hispanic American Historical Review. His future research includes a second book project tentatively titled Empirical Statecraft: The Emergence of an Information Empire in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Atlantic.