Richard L. Kagan

Richard Kagan is the Arthur O. Lovejoy Professor emeritus of History at John Hopkins University. Much of his research and writing is on the intellectual and legal history of the Spanish Empire under the Habsburgs, as well as Spain’s artistic and cultural relations with the United States.

He has also written and edited important works such as Ciudades españolas del Siglo de Oro: las vistas españolas de Anton Van den Wyngaerde (1986); Spain, Europe and the Atlantic World (with Geoffrey Parker; 1995; Spanish edn. 2001); Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800 (with Philip D. Morgan, 2009), and is the translator and editor, with Abigail Dyer, of Inquisitorial Inquiries: Brief Lives of Secret Jews and Other Heretics (2011). His most recent publications examine the place of Hispanic culture in the U.S. His latest book is The Inquisition’s Inquisitor: Henry Charles Lea of Philadelphia (2024).

In addition to his membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is a member of the American Philosophical Society, Corresponding Member of Spain’s Real Academia de la Historia, and Comendador in Spain’s Orden de Isabel la Católica.

Upon earning a Ph.D. in History from Cambridge University in 1968, Kagan taught at Indiana University before joining the Hopkins faculty in 1972.