Fabien Montcher

Fabien Montcher is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Iberian Studies at Saint Louis University. His research focuses on the history of knowledge and politics, with particular attention to the Iberian worlds and the Mediterranean Sea from the Renaissance to the Present. Currently, he is investigating how Spanish and Portuguese presence across the Mediterranean contributed to global entanglements with a diverse array of Southern European and North African societies. His work highlights how these interactions transformed cultures of knowledge, material exchanges, human migrations, and environmental practices.

Fabien’s research and teaching are informed by sustained and active intellectual engagement with diverse academic and research traditions, cross-cultural perspectives, and empirical enquiries in archives and libraries across the Mediterranean and beyond. Trained as a historian in both France and Spain, he later moved to the U.S. to broaden the scope of scholarly work. He is the author of Mercenaries of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2023), which explores how the circulations of libraries, books and manuscripts across the Western Mediterranean facilitated intellectual and diplomatic communication during periods of conflicts–what he terms “Mediterranean bibliopolitics.” His current book project examines the political history of citrus fruits across the Mediterranean and broader Iberian worlds. At the heart of this research lies the political ecology of citrus cultivation, transplantation, and commodification, and the development of a fruit diplomacy across the Iberian and Italian peninsulas, along islands such as the Balearics, Malta, Crete, or Corsica, and the former Spanish kingdoms of Naples and Sicily.

Fabien’s work has been supported by the UCLA Clark Library, the Haïfa Center for Mediterranean History, the Huntington Library, the Sapienza University in Rome, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the FLAD Foundation in Lisbon, the Newberry Library, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (Sir John Elliott Inaugural Member). As a side note, Fabien maintains an abiding curiosity for Mediterranean wines–particularly those cultivated on islands such as Sicily (near Mount Etna and Palermo), Sardinia, Corsica, the Balearics, and Pantelleria, the latter perched between Tunisia and Sicily–regions where history, terroir, and the diversity of Mediterranean lives coalesce in the glass.

Language spoken : English