Dr. Iris Engstrand wins 2008-09 University Professorship

Monday, February 11 2008 @ 03:40 PM PST

Congratulations to Dr. Iris Engstrand for winning the 2008-09 University Professorship.

Dr. Iris Engstrand is an internationally recognized scholar of Spain’s eighteenth-century scientists and explorers. She has published five books on the subject, including Spanish Scientists in the New World (1980), twenty-one articles, and eighteen contributions to books. She was the assistant editor of The Malaspina Expedition, 1789-1794, published by the Hakluyt Society in 2003. She also has given numerous scholarly papers on Spain and the Spanish Empire, most recently at the National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian Institution conference on “Spain’s Legacy in the American War for Independence.”

In 2007, Juan Carlos I, King of Spain, honored her with a knighthood, the La Real Orden de Isabel la Católica, in recognition of her work on Spanish scientists and explorers. She is only one of a handful of U.S. citizens to have received this prestigious award.

Her current project is a particularly important one as it will bring together original watercolors from Naval Museum in Madrid and the Hunt Institute in Pittsburgh, identify the artists, and place the project of encyclopedic illustration in the context of the eighteenth-century quest for empire. The topic is of great interest to Anglo-American scholars whose work, to date, has focused on the natural history of the English-speaking world. It will contribute towards broadening the boundaries of international science in the eighteenth-century.

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