Felipe Fernández-Armesto is a historian of astounding breadth whose work spans epochs and moves from specialized studies to sweeping re-examinations of humankind’s relation to the planet. He has written on European exploration and conquest, the way people respond to the ecological world around them, cultures and rulers that flourished in a thousand year tide of history, the future of religion, methods for determining truth that exist together in every culture, food and how the way we obtain it has shaped societies, ideas that changed the world, the intricate and common forces that molded the western hemisphere, and new challenges from science and philosophy that are shaking our understanding of what it means to be human. Named last year as the Prince of Asturias Professor of Spanish Culture and Civilization at Tufts University, Dr. Fernández-Armesto is concurrently professor of global environmental history, as well as professor of history and geography, at Queen Mary College, London, where he directs the global history program of the Institute of Historical Research. For many years, he was also a member of the Faculty of Modern History at Oxford University. He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he took first-class honors in modern history, and St. John’s College, Oxford, where he was a senior scholar for two years before receiving his D.Phil. in history in 1977. He served five years as assistant master of the Charterhouse School, and in 1981, he returned to Oxford as a fellow of St. Antony’s College. He joined the faculty of Queen Mary College in 2000. Dr. Fernández-Armesto has been a visiting senior lecturer and a visiting professor at the University of Warwick, the Andrew W. Mellon Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and Union Pacific Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota. A fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Antiquarians of London, and the Royal Society of Arts, as well as a professorial fellow of Queen Mary College and an associate fellow of the University of London’s Institute for the Study of the Americas, he has been the recipient of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, the Caird Medal of the National Maritime Museum, the John Carter Brown Medal, and the Premio de Investigación of the Spanish Geographical Society. He was awarded an honorary degree by La Trobe University in Melbourne. He has given invited lectures at the John Carter Brown Library, Harvard, the University of Minnesota, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Cape Town, Leiden University, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, the University of Edinburgh, and Trinity College, Dublin, among other places. He currently serves as chairman of the trustees of the PEN Literary Foundation and a member of Helen Wallis Memorial Fellowship Panel, the Council of the Hakluyt Society, the International Slow Foods Award Jury, and the AXA-Art Newspaper Prize Jury. Joint editor-in-chief of The Malaspina Projects of the Hakluyt Society, he serves on the editorial committee for a Leiden University series, Studies in Overseas History, and on the editorial boards of the Center for Early Modern History at the University of Minnesota, the Journal of Global History, Journeys, and of volume III of the University of Chicago Press’s History of Cartography. Dr. Fernández-Armesto has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and is the joint editor (with James Muldoon) of An Expanding World: The Medieval Background, which will be published next year by Background Ashgate Press, as well as the editor or co-editor of ten other books. He is the co-author of two books and the author of sixteen others, which have been translated into twenty-two languages. Among the most recent are: Columbus (1991), Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years (1995), Religion (1998), Truth: A History (1999), Civilizations (2001), Food: A History (2001), Ideas (2003), and The Americas: A Hemispheric History (2003). His latest study, Humankind: A Brief History, was published in 2004 by Oxford University Press.