Lecture: Bad Blood: Old Christians, Jews, and Conversos in the Spanish Extremadura

Dr. Roger Martinez, history professor and Director of the Sephardic and Crypto-Jewish Studies Program at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, will present “Bad Blood: Old Christians, Jews, and Conversos in the Spanish Extremadura” on Thursday October 24th at 7 pm in Ringsmuth Auditorium.

Since Fall 2010, Dr. Martínez has served as an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. From fall 2008 – spring 2010, he served as the Burton Postdoctoral Fellow at St. Joseph’s University (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) and earned his Ph.D. in May 2008 from the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Martínez specializes in the study of medieval and early modern Spain, religious minorities and religious converts in Spain (in particular, Jews and conversos), and Spanish trans-Atlantic migration to Mexico and Bolivia.

Currently, Dr. Martínez serves as the First Vice President of the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies, an organization that fosters the research of the historical and contemporary development of crypto–Jews of Iberian origin.  His forthcoming text, Blood, Faith, and Fate: Jews, Conversos, and Old Christian in Early Modern Spain and Colonial Spanish America, is under contract with a university press. He has published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian Crypto-Jews and reviewed books for The Sixteenth Century Journal and The Americas.

Dr. Martínez is a native of San Antonio, Texas. He has resided in South America, Spain, and both the west and east coasts of the United States. During his formative years he lived in Caracas, Venezuela, and La Paz, Bolivia.