Treasures of Southern Spain and Portugal

Ellen Lokos is a university professor, actor, director, and speaker. As Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature at Harvard, she taught a wide range of topics including the literature of the Early Modern period, contemporary women’s fiction, and the post-war novel in Spain. While at Harvard, she published a groundbreaking book, The Solitary Journey: Cervantes’s Voyage to Parnassus; was a frequent speaker at international conferences; and received numerous teaching awards from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. Ellen has also taught at Bentley University, Boston University, Clark University, and, most recently, at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. In addition to her teaching duties, she co-directed a bilingual theater troupe that produced original plays. Ellen created an innovative, month-long college course based in Madrid, leading students on trips throughout Spain as they studied Spanish culture and identity in depth.

In the early years of her career, Ellen resided in Madrid and worked on a television news-magazine show. Her responsibilities included translation and interpretation while conducting live, on-camera interviews of politicians, celebrities, and newsmakers. Ellen is a seasoned global traveler and is passionate about sharing her enthusiasm for cultural exploration with others.

Ana Afzali is a Spanish-born medievalist and a scholar of the Iberian Renaissance who specializes in the history and literature of Spain and Portugal. Currently a tenured professor at Citrus College in southern California, Ana received a Distinguished Faculty award in 2019 and has also taught Spanish culture, literature, and language at the University of California-Los Angeles.

She has published extensively on the political and cultural history and literature of Spain and Portugal in the Middle Ages, and authored the book Modern Spain (2009) as well as a book about the Spanish Civil War (2022) that is awaiting translation into English.

A native of Madrid with family roots in Galicia, Ana has traveled and lectured extensively through Spain and Portugal, including with numerous Smithsonian Journeys tours since 2008. She is well-versed in the history and culture of the Camino de Santiago, having hiked the pilgrimage trail several times.

Janet Duncan Jones, Professor Emerita of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Bucknell University, is an archaeologist with over 40 years‘ experience in the field. She has participated in excavation projects in Turkey, Greece, Tunisia, and Jordan. Her experience as a glassblower out of college ignited a career long research interest in preindustrial technologies and the lives of early craft workers. While living in villages in the Middle East she became interested in the impacts of preindustrial technologies on the ancient environment and the evolution of cultural landscapes. Her publications include studies of the ancient glass from sites in Turkey and Jordan, and synthetic considerations of the landscape of ancient ruins and of the messages and impacts of ancient mega-engineering projects. Recently she has focused her work on the impact of the Moors in southern Spain on urbanism, architecture, technology, and intellectual history.

Janet has lived in Turkey and Greece, and has traveled widely with an eye toward the messages that landscapes send us about the values and concerns of past peoples. She holds degrees from the College of William and Mary and from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she also acquired a devotion to ACC basketball. She lives in the mountains of central Pennsylvania with her geographer husband and hounds descended from those she originally imported from the Euphrates Valley in southeastern Turkey. 

Erik Gustafson is an architectural historian of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Islamic world, whose interests span from the ancient world into the early modern period. He has lived in Italy, France, and Egypt, and has traveled extensively in northern Europe, Iberia, and the eastern Mediterranean. Erik’s academic work addresses how specific sites were historically understood in light of broad intellectual and visual traditions. His current book project, Building Saint Francis, considers how the Franciscan order used architecture to shape and channel the legacy of their founder in the centuries after his death. While completing his PhD on the Franciscan architecture of Tuscany at New York University, he spent several years living in Florence and Rome. Erik has taught a variety of courses on art and architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, Fordham University, Washington & Lee University, and George Mason University. He has published on Italian, Spanish, and French medieval architecture as well as Mamluk architecture in Cairo, and is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome.

Dianne Konz is a scholar who specializes in Spain, Portugal, and the western Mediterranean, and has taught Spanish history and civilization at the University of Texas at Austin and at The George Washington University. She has lectured and published studies on Spanish culture and Spanish and Latin American literature, and has a particular passion for the integration of the cultural arts in the context of their time. She approaches art and architecture, literature, music, and gastronomy as a reflection of a country's history, politics, and geography.

Dianne's enthusiasm for Iberia grew from her experiences living and studying in Madrid. Her teachings include the Moorish and Islamic conquest and occupation of Iberia, and the rich cultural heritage of the Islamic presence in Iberia. Since 1992, Dianne has led numerous Smithsonian Journeys groups to Spain and Portugal.

Dr. Allen Fromherz is a professor of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern history at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College in 2002 and received his PhD in Medieval Islamic History from St. Andrews University in Scotland in 2006. Allen’s first two books, The Almohads: the Rise of an Islamic Empire and Ibn Khaldun, Life and Times examine the rise of empire in medieval North Africa and Iberia. His book The Near West: North Africa and Europe traces the history of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish interactions across the Western Mediterranean, especially in Iberia, Morocco, Tunisia, and Italy. He has been a senior Fulbright grantee to Spain and is completing a book on the life and times of Ibn al-Khatib, a 14th-century polymath and minister who wrote poetry for the Alhambra in Granada. 

Allen previously held international fellowships from the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, and a senior humanities grant from NYU Abu Dhabi. He is the co-founder and co-editor of the Edinburgh Book Series on the Maghreb (North Africa). He currently leads studies abroad for his students at Georgia State, including the popular Marvels of Medieval Spain: the Culture and History of Muslims, Jews, and Christians and a study abroad to Italy. His regular classes on the Middle East, North Africa, medieval Italy and Spain, and the Mediterranean focus on encounters between Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

Dr. Roger Martínez-Dávila is a specialist in medieval and Renaissance Europe who has dedicated his life to better understanding intercultural and interreligious relations. In particular, he tracks the lives of religious and cultural minorities in Iberia – such as Sephardic Jews and Muslims or resilient communities like the Basque. 

Roger has visited every province of Spain over his 20-year career, and his travel and life abroad reflect his global perspective of the Middle Ages, drawing together the mixed Mediterranean and Gothic cultures of Spain, Portugal, Italy, and North Africa, as well as the Frankish and Germanic peoples of France and the Low Countries. He is also researching how Scandinavia, the Islamic Levant, and Arabia contributed to Europe’s medieval civilization.

Presently a professor of history at the University of Colorado and previously a Marie Curie Fellow at the Universidad de Carlos III de Madrid, Roger is an authority on medieval manuscripts and material culture. He relishes the opportunity to share his stories of investigating special Papal collections at the Vatican’s Secret Archive and Inquisition cases in the archives of Madrid and Lisbon.

Roger holds a doctorate in history from the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s in public policy from the University of California - Berkeley. He is the author of Creating Conversos: The Carvajal-Santa María Family in Early Modern Spain as well as Fractured Faiths: Spanish Judaism, The Inquisition, and New World Identities, based on an exhibition he helped curate for the New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe. 

Dr. Fabio Esteban Amador is a multifaceted expert: an archaeologist, visual artist, explorer, and anthropology professor at New Jersey City University. His journey began in fine arts, where he discovered how early explorers used art and technology to document ancient cultures. This sparked a shift in focus towards archaeology, leading him to earn a master’s and Ph.D. from the State University of New York in Buffalo. As an explorer, Fabio pushes the boundaries of knowledge on cultural complexity, art, and mythology in the Americas, the Caribbean, the Iberian peninsula, and Southeast Asia. He leverages photography and creative imaging technologies to assess archaeological site conditions and craft visual narratives, merging art and science. Through his work, Fabio provides new insights into the emergence of cultural complexity and the role of art in shaping origin stories and mythology.