Fabio López Lázaro

Fabio Lopez Lazaro 2020Associate Professor
Global, Transnational, and World History; Medieval and Early Modern Maritime History; Piracy, Privateering, Capitalism and Imperialism; Transnational and Transoceanic European History; Colonial Latin America and Atlantic History; Mediterranean History

Director, Center for Research in World History (at the University of Hawaiʻi)

Office: Sakamaki A408
Phone: (808) 956-7149
Email: fll@hawaii.edu

BA University of Western Ontario, 1985; MA Simon Fraser University, 1989; PhD University of Toronto, 1996


Background

Fabio López Lázaro was raised in Spain until his parents, who were active in the anti-Franco movement, immigrated to Canada as political exiles. López Lázaro received an M.A. in Middle Eastern and Islamic history at Simon Fraser University under the guidance of William Cleveland, the historian of modern Arab nationalism. He went on to study medieval and early modern history with Jocelyn Hillgarth, Joseph Shatzmiller, and William Callahan at the University of Toronto and the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies (Ph.D., 1996). López Lázaro has taught World, Mediterranean, European, Latin American, Middle Eastern, and Islamic History at Stanford, Arizona State, Calgary, and Santa Clara universities. He was presented with the University of Calgary Students’ Union Teaching Excellence Award in 2000 and with Santa Clara University’s Research Excellence Award in 2011. López Lázaro’s research publications focus on legal, political, and maritime world history between 1300 and 1700. His most recent book, The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez: The True Adventures of a Spanish American with 17th Century Pirates (University of Texas Press, 2011), proves that what was believed to be the New World’s oldest novel—published in Mexico City in 1690—is in fact not a fiction at all but an eyewitness account of how imperialists and pirates tangled from Asia through Latin America to Europe. López Lázaro’s interest in global and maritime history started at an early age and during his twenties he studied sailing and navigation in the Pacific with Captain James Cook (alas, not the famous eighteenth-century one!).

Selected Publications

Books

Peer-reviewed Articles, Chapters, Encyclopedia Entries

  • “Transliminal Comparisons in the Tombstone Inscriptions of Muslim and Christian Rulers in the Maghrib and Iberia.” In Islamic Ecumene: Comparing Global Muslim Societies, ed. Eric Tagliacozzo and David S. Powers. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, forthcoming [2023].
  • “Worlding History.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory, ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Christian Moraru (Bloomsbury Academic: New York, London, Oxford: 2021): 21-48.
  • “The Rise and Global Significance of the First ‘West’: The Medieval Islamic Maghrib.” Journal of World History 24.2 (2013): 259-307.
  • (By invitation) “Predation’s Place within Profit: Pirates and Capitalists within the Seventeenth-Century Rise of Lockean Liberalism.” Appeared in a Special Forum of the IJMH, “Piracy—Just as Man Made It,” edited by David Starkey, International Journal of Maritime History 23 (2011): 241-76.
  • “Labour Disputes, Ethnic Quarrels, and Early Modern Piracy: A Mixed Hispano-Anglo-Dutch Squadron and the Causes of Captain Every’s 1694 Mutiny.” International Journal of Maritime History 22.2 (2010): 73-111.
  • “Pirates of the Caribbean: Early Modern Spain and Latin America as Part of the Atlantic World.” Bulletin of the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies 33 (2008): 9-22.
  • (By invitation) “Recent Works on the Early Modern History of Spanish Muslims.” Catholic Historical Review 94 (2008): 102-107.
  • La mentira histórica de un pirata caribeño: el descubrimiento del trasfondo histórico de los Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (1690).” Anuario de estudios americanos 64.2 (2007): 87-104.
  • “Sweet Food of Knowledge: Botany, Food and Empire in the Early Modern Spanish Kingdoms.” In At the Table: Metaphorical and Material Cultures in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Juliann Vitullo and Timothy Tomasik, 3-28. Vol. 18. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, edited by Robert Bjork. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007.
  • “Encyclopedia articles: Corn; Frankincense and Myrrh; Jute; Linen.” In Cynthia Northrup, ed., An Encyclopedia of World Trade: From Ancient Times to the Present. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2005.
  • “Montezuma’s Gardens: The Impact of Aztec Botany on Mediterranean Culture.” Chronica: The Journal of the Medieval Association of the Pacific 64 (2005): 27.
  • “Encyclopedia articles: Ambrose Bierce; Andrew Carnegie; Sigmund Freud; D.W. Griffith; William Randolph Hearst; Edgar Lee Masters; Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.; Frederick Law Olmsted Sr.; and Cornelius Vanderbilt.” In Joseph Buenker, ed., Encyclopedia of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2005).
  • “Encyclopedia articles: Jeremy Bentham; Ferdinand VII; Goyahkla (Geronimo); Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingrès; Thomas Jefferson; Giuseppe Mazzini; Cyrus McCormick; Theodore Roosevelt; Heinrich Schlieman; Leland Stanford; and Tataŋka Iyotaŋka (Sitting Bull).” In Jeffrey A. Bell, ed., Industrialization and Imperialism 1800-1914: A Biographical Dictionary. Volume 7, Ronald H. Fritze, series editor, The Great Cultural Eras of the Western World. (Westport, Connecticut; London, England: Greenwood Press, 2002)
  • No Deceit Safe in its Hiding Place: The Criminal Trial in Eighteenth-Century Spain.” Law and History Review, 20.3 (Fall 2002), 449-478.

Representative Publications

Historical

Les Infortunes d'Alonso Ramírez The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez Crime in Early Bourbon Madrid (1700‑1808) Journal of World History
Industrialization and Imperialism, 1800-1914 At the Table Encyclopedia of World Trade: From Ancient Times to the Present

As translator of poetry (English to Spanish and Spanish to English)

Antología de Spoon River

Poemas Para La Paz

Poetic Asylum