Joan-Pau Rubiés graduated in Early Modern History at the University of Barcelona (1987), where he received the extraordinary degree prize. He went on to do a PhD at the University of Cambridge, funded with an external studentship from King's College (1987-1991). He was subsequently Research Fellow at Queens's College, Cambridge, and Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. In 1994 he became Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Reading, and in 1999 he joined the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He was Reader in International History at the LSE until 2012, when he accepted the offer of a Research Professorship at ICREA, which he holds at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He has been visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études twice (Paris and Marseille), Corpus Christi College (Oxford), the Harvard University Centre for Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti (Florence), and Roma Tre (Rome).
Research interests
I am a historian specialized in the study of cross-cultural encounters in the early modern world, from a perspective combining the contextual analysis of ethnographic sources with the intellectual history of early modern Europe. My focus in the last few years has been analyzing early modern ethnography and its intellectual impact in the period 1500-1800. This has involved developing various parallel lines of analysis, including travel writing, cross-cultural diplomacy, religious missions, early orientalism, race and racism, and the history of cosmopolitanism. A growing concern has been to develop a global comparative perspective on these topics (including Asia and the New World) that might help interrogate critically the eurocentric categories of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Since 2014 I coordinate the Research Grup on Ethnographies, Cultural Encounters and Religious Missions in the Iberian World (ECERM) at UPF, which has received funding from the ERC, AGAUR (SGR) and MINECO.
Selected publications
- Rubiés JP 2025, The Renaissance of Encounters and the Renaissance of Antiquities, Renaissance Quarterly, 78/1: 1-41.
- Rubies JP 2025, 'Discourses of Religion and Sacrifice in Sub-Saharan West Africa, c.1500-c.1700', Sacrifice and Sacred Violence. History, Comparisons, and the Early Modern World. Cristiana Facchini, Girolamo Imbruglia, Vincenzo Lavenia, Sabina Pavone (eds), 371-403.
- Rubiés JP 2025, Review of Rolando Minuti, 'L’Oriente nella cultura Europea del Lungo ‘700', in Cromohs. Cyber Review of Modern Historiography 27 (2024): 153-161.
Selected research activities
This year I have continued working on the twin projects of "Rethinking the Global Renaissance" and "Rethinking the Global Enlightenment". The publication of last year's Josephine Bennett Lecture in Renaissance Quarterly was followed by two interventions at this year's annual meeting of the RSA, one on 'Asian and African Perspectives on the Global Renaissance' and another on 'Italy and Spain in the making of the Global Renaissance'. This second talk is also the starting point for a new application for funding from the Spanish Government for a collaborative project on Politics and Culture at the Court of Charles V: Gasparo Contarini between Italy and Spain and the making of the transational Renaissance. Also forthcoming in early 2026 is my 'Cultural Diversity in Francesco Carletti' (I Tatti Research Series). I gave a Keynote Lecture on empires and cultural diversity ('Espanto y admiración: la gestión de la diversidad cultural en los imperios coloniales de la primera modernidad') in Bilbao, and related talks on 'Community, tolerance and cosmopolitanism in the early modern world' in Leuven and Pamplona. Finally, developing the comparative perspective, I completed an article on 'Early Modernity, the Global Renaissance and the Problem of Eurocentrism' (forthcoming at JEMH in 2026) and an application for an ERC Advanced Grant on Re-thinking Early Modernity: A Comparative History of European, Islamic and Chinese Ethnographic Traditions.