Prof Will Fowler

Prof Will Fowler

Professor

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 2964
Email
wmf1@st-andrews.ac.uk
Office
Room 33
Location
United Colleges
Office hours
Monday 4-5, Wednesday 9-10

 

Biography

Professor Will Fowler was born and grew up in Barcelona, Spain, and came to Britain in 1985 to study Drama and Spanish at the University of Bristol. He stayed on in Bristol to complete a PhD thesis on an aspect of nineteenth-century Mexican political history, spending a year carrying out archival research in Mexico City (1990-91). He worked as a lecturer in Spanish at Leicester Polytechnic (subsequently renamed De Montfort University) for four years before joining the University of St Andrews in 1995. Professor of Spanish since 2006, he is the author of Mexico in the Age of Proposals, 1821-1853 (Westport, CT: 1998); Tornel and Santa Anna, The Writer and the Caudillo (Westport, CT: 2000); Latin America since 1780 (London, 2002; 2nd edition, 2008; 3rd edition, 2016); Santa Anna of Mexico (Lincoln, NE: 2007) (translated into Spanish first as Santa Anna by the Universidad Veracruzana in 2010, and more recently by Planeta in 2018 with the title Santa Anna. ¿Héroe o traidor? La biografía que rompe el mito); Independent Mexico. The Pronunciamiento in the Age of Santa Anna, 1821-1858 (Lincoln, NE: 2016); and La Guerra de Tres Años, 1857-1861. El conflicto del que nació el Estado laico mexicano (Mexico City: 2020). He has published numerous articles and edited fourteen volumes on Mexican and Latin American political history, including Diplomacia, negocios y política. Ensayos sobre la relación entre México y el Reino Unido en el siglo XIX, co-edited with Marcela Terrazas (Mexico City, 2018), and Mexico 1848-1853: Los Años Olvidados, co-edited with Pedro Santoni (New York, 2018). He coordinated a three-year AHRC-funded project on the dynamics and culture of the Mexican pronunciamiento (1821-76) (2007-2010), and, benefitting from a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant he has recently completed his monograph on The Grammar of Civil War. A Mexican Case-Study (1857-61), recently released by the University of Nebraska Press on 1 July 2022. Professor Fowler is a member (corresponsal internacional) of the Academia Mexicana de la Historia.

Research areas

Latin American political history, especially of nineteenth-century Mexico: political ideas, factions, and institutions; biography (generals Tornel and Santa Anna); insurrectionary politics (the pronunciamiento) and military interventionism; issues of national identity; post-war Mexico (1848-1853); British-Mexican relations since independence; the Civil War of Reforma (1857-1861); and, currently, the Mexican Reform Period from a transnational perspective.

PhD supervision

  • Alejandro Adame Basilio

Selected publications

 

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