Dr. Izaskun Álvarez Cuartero is Associate Professor of Latin American History and Pre-Columbian and Indian cultures at the University of Salamanca. Professor Álvarez received her BA in geography and history (1989) and some years later her PhD in history (1994), both from the University of Deusto. She got a postdoctoral fellowship (1995-97) at the University of Salamanca, where she joined as Assistant Professor in the Department of Medieval, Modern and Contemporary History in 1997. She took a Master in Amerindian Anthropology from the University Complutense in Madrid (2002). Professor Álvarez has been Visiting Scholar at John Carter Brown Library, Providence, and at the Center for Latin American Studies in the University of Texas at Austin.
Professor Álvarez specializes in Colonial Latin American history, focusing specifically on Cuba and the Yucatan region from the 18th to 20th centuries. She has published a wide array of articles dealing with Cuban history during the Enlightenment and the discourse of a Cuban nation in the 19th century. Her book Memorias de la Ilustración. Las Sociedades Económicas de Amigos del País en Cuba, 1783-1832 (2000), is centered in institutional history and the Enlightenment mentality. She is the co-editor, with Julio Sánchez, of the series Visiones y revisiones de la Independencia Americana, that has recently issued Entre marginados y excluidos: indígenas e independencias (2009). Along with M.a Dolores González- Ripoll, they have co-edited Francisco Arango y la invención azucarera (2009).
Her current book-length research project examines the intersection between Yucatan history during the colonial period and the traffic of Maya labor with Cuba in mid-19th century. Related to this area of work, she will continue studying the violence against Maya women during the colonial period and beyond independence and biopolitical aspects of the Mayan Histories. She has been invited by several American and European universities to teach specialized seminars and give lectures on her fields of research such as the universities of Azores, Bergen, Iceland, Paris, Pau or Warsaw and she collaborates with the University of Oriente (Valladolid, Yucatan) in promoting the study of Maya language in Salamanca while she tries to implement new research and teaching methods in Valladolid, Mexico.