Dr Gonzalo Velasco Berenguer

Research profile

I am an historian of global medieval and early modern history with a particular focus on political, religious, social and racial processes across the Spanish Monarchy. I am especially interested in understanding how the legislation devised and enacted by the king’s government was received and applied both in Spain and in colonial settings and what this meant for the everyday lived experience of Spanish subjects across the Empire. I also study early modern Catholicism, identity and early modern Anglo-Iberian relations.

My current research looks at patterns of family formation and racial categorisations in the early modern Spanish Philippines. We have an increasingly clear historiographical picture of the different sets of ethnic categorisations used across Spanish America to distinguish between Indigenous peoples (Indios), Afrodescendants (who received many different names) and Spaniards (españoles), and how miscegenation shaped everyday life and dictated human experience in a colonial setting. The case of the Philippines is, however, grossly underexplored, even though the presence of a sizeable number of Chinese people and their descendants (Sangleyes) makes of this Southeast Asian territory a paradigmatic and unique case from which to explore race and society in a global early modern context. Through an exploration of marriage and other Church records, wills, taxation lists, and reports on limpieza de sangre (cleanliness of blood), I seek to understand patterns of family formation and what the expectations of colonial legislators translated into on the ground. This research will form the basis for my second book, tentatively titled A Mixture of Peoples: Blood, Nation and Intimacies in the Spanish Philippines, 1565-1815.

My past research has looked at the joint reign of Philip and Mary in England (1554-1558) and how the English kingdom became an integral part of the Spanish Monarchy, albeit for a short period. This research has now been published as a monograph, Habsburg England: Politics, Religion, and Society in the Reign of Philip I (1554-1558) by Brill (2023). I have also published articles in The Sixteenth Century Journal and The English Historical Review.

Teaching

I have taught a range of units on a variety of topics and periods:

MA Explorations in Early Modern History (unit coordinator)

Year 3 Dissertation supervision

Year 3 Option: Global Empires (unit coordinator)

Year 2 Special Subject: The Norman Conquest

Year 2 Outline: Asia in Global Context

Year 2 Outline: Rethinking History

Year 2 Option: Fear and Loathing (unit coordinator)

Year 2 Option: The Tudor World (unit coordinator)

Year 2 Option: Outlaws

Year 2 Option: The Politics of the Past

Year 1 Outline: The Early Modern World (unit coordinator)

Year 1 Outline: The Medieval World

Year 1 Outline: Approaching the Past

Year 1 Option: War and Society

Administrative duties

I am the convenor for the History Research Seminar Series at Bristol as well as Head of Year 1.

Linguistic profile

Spanish (native speaker)

English (bilingual)

French

Italian

Can read and translate Latin (early modern), Catalan and Portuguese

Public engagement

BBC Two, Lucy Worsley Investigates, ‘Bloody Mary’, 2025

BBC Radio 4, In Our Time, ‘Catherine of Aragon’, 2025

History Hit, ‘Mary Tudor – Real Fake History’, 2023 (also available as a podcast)

Not Just the Tudors Podcast, ‘Philip II of Spain, King of England’, 2021

Article for The Conversation, ‘When England had a Spanish king – and what that tells us about Camilla’s title’, 2023

Article for The Conversation, ‘There have been 58 royal arrests in UK history – Charles I was not the last before Andrew Mountbatten‑Windsor’, 2026