Andrew Devereux

Andrew Devereux is an historian of the medieval and early modern Mediterranean.  He earned his Ph.D. in 2011 from the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University.  His doctoral research was supported by grants from the IIE-Fulbright and from the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Education.

            Since completing his PhD, Devereux has been an Ahmanson-Getty postdoctoral fellow at UCLA (2011-2012) and a Kluge Fellow at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress (2015-2016).  He was an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Loyola Marymount University from 2012 to 2018.  His work has also been recognized with grants from the Folger Institute and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

            Devereux has published in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Medieval Encounters, and Republics of Letters.  He has contributed chapters to In and Of the Mediterranean: Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Studies, ed. Michelle Hamilton & Núria Silleras-Fernández (Vanderbilt University Press, 2015) and Representing Imperial Rivalry in the Early Modern Mediterranean, ed. Barbara Fuchs & Emily Weissbourd (University of Toronto Press, 2015).  His first book, The Other Side of Empire (forthcoming with Cornell University Press), takes an expansive view of Spanish rationales for empire by analyzing processes of Mediterranean expansion against similar episodes of Spanish expansion in the early sixteenth-century Americas.

           Professor Devereux is a founding member of the Spain-North Africa Project and currently serves as the organization’s President.  He also serves on the Advisory Board to the Mediterranean Seminar.

In his scholarship, Professor Devereux approaches the history of the Mediterranean from a global perspective, examining the Sea’s connections to the wider world, particularly those forces that brought the region into contact with Northern Europe, with West Africa, with Central Asia, as well as with the maritime systems of the Atlantic and Indian oceans.

           Devereux’s first book, The Other Side of Empire: Spain, the Mediterranean, and the Evolution of Universalist Imperial Ideologies, 1479-1551 (forthcoming in 2019 with Cornell University Press), examines legal and moral arguments Spaniards crafted in the early sixteenth century to justify acts of war and conquest in a variety of Mediterranean locales, including North Africa, the Kingdom of Naples, and the Kingdom of Navarre.  Throughout, the book engages with the better-known counterpart to these arguments that Spaniards developed in order to represent their conquests in the Americas as a process of “just war.”

           Devereux’s second book, provisionally titled Children of Adam: Prelapsarian Gentiles and Ethno-Religious Difference in the Construction of Early Modern Hierarchies, is a study of Iberians’ encounters with non-Abrahamic inhabitants of the southern regions of the globe (the Canary Islands, West Africa, and the Caribbean) from the mid-fourteenth to the early seventeenth century.  The book analyzes Iberians’ divergent responses to the Gentile peoples they encountered in different regions, taking an integrative approach to processes occurring in the eastern Atlantic basin and those in the Caribbean.  The book examines political thought on sovereignty and natural law, doctrines governing captivity and enslavement, as well as constructions of difference according to categories of religious as well as ethnic/racial identity.

           Professor Devereux offers undergraduate and graduate courses on the early modern Mediterranean, on Golden Age Spain, on medieval Spain, on Mediterranean urban spaces, Mediterranean environmental history, among other offerings.  All these courses address the fascinating religious and cultural complexities of the Mediterranean Sea basin. 

Spanish History (medieval and early modern)

Mediterranean History (medieval and early modern) 

Urban Spaces in the Mediterranean

Late Medieval & Early Modern Europe