Jodi Campbell, professor emerita of Texas Christian University (TCU), earned her PhD in European history from the University of Minnesota and a Fulbright Fellowship to Spain. Her fascination with Spain comes from its rich diversity of past and present cultures—Celtic, Roman, Muslim, Castilian, Basque, Catalan—and how its history is preserved, interpreted, and disputed. She has walked across several hundred miles of Spain, following the medieval pilgrimage trails to Santiago. As a historian, she is interested in how ordinary people in the past understood and maintained their relationships and communities, and how we in the present choose to tell stories about the past. She has published several books and articles on Spanish history and culture, including At the First Table: Food and Social Identity in Early Modern Spain and Theater of Negotiation: Political Culture and Drama in Seventeenth-Century Madrid, and is co-editor of the new Routledge Handbook of the History of Madrid. Her academic honors include TCU Honors Professor of the Year in Teaching and the A.M. Pate, Jr. Research Professorship.

Recently retired from university teaching, Jodi now lives in Madrid and spends her time seeking out interesting new corners of Spain and burrowing into archives to sift through centuries-old documents and listen to the voices of the past.