Will Fowler is a Barcelona-born historian and novelist based in the Department of Spanish at the University of St Andrews since 1995.

Having grown up in Spain, he came to Britain in 1985 to study Drama and Spanish at the University of Bristol. He stayed on in Bristol to complete a PhD thesis on an aspect of nineteenth-century Mexican political history, spending a year carrying out archival research in Mexico City (1990-91). He worked as a lecturer in Spanish at Leicester Polytechnic (subsequently renamed De Montfort University) for four years before joining the University of St Andrews in 1995. Professor of Spanish since 2006, he is the author of:

Mexico in the Age of Proposals, 1821-1853 (Westport, CT: 1998); 

Tornel and Santa Anna, The Writer and the Caudillo (Westport, CT: 2000); 

Latin America since 1780 (London, 2002; 2nd edition, 2008; 3rd edition, 2016); 

Santa Anna of Mexico (Lincoln, NE: 2007) (translated into Spanish first as Santa Anna by the Universidad Veracruzana in 2010, and more recently by Planeta in 2018 with the title Santa Anna. ¿Héroe o traidor? La biografía que rompe el mito);

Independent Mexico. The Pronunciamiento in the Age of Santa Anna, 1821-1858 (Lincoln, NE: 2016);

La Guerra de Tres Años, 1857-1861. El conflicto del que nació el Estado laico mexicano (Mexico City: 2020);

The Grammar of Civil War. A Mexican Case-Study (1857-61) (Lincoln, NE: 2022);

and Maximiliano (Mexico City: 2025).

He is also the author of the novel Patriotas (a family saga set in nineteenth-century Mexico) (Mexico City, 2024). His second novel Traidores (set during the Mexican Revolution) is due to come out with Planeta in September 2026.

He has published numerous articles and edited fourteen volumes on Mexican and Latin American political history, including Diplomacia, negocios y política. Ensayos sobre la relación entre México y el Reino Unido en el siglo XIX, co-edited with Marcela Terrazas (Mexico City, 2018), and Mexico 1848-1853: Los Años Olvidados, co-edited with Pedro Santoni (New York, 2018). He also coordinated a three-year AHRC-funded project on the dynamics and culture of the Mexican pronunciamiento (1821-76) (2007-2010).

Professor Fowler is a member (corresponsal internacional) of the Academia Mexicana de la Historia and Co-Director of the c19c Cross Cultural circa Nineteenth Century Research Centre.

Latin American political history, especially of nineteenth-century Mexico: political ideas, factions, and institutions; biography (generals Tornel and Santa Anna, Emperor Maximilian); insurrectionary politics (the pronunciamiento) and military interventionism; issues of national identity; British-Mexican relations; post-war Mexico (1848-1853); the Civil War of Reforma (1857-1861); the Mexican Reform Period from a transnational perspective; Mexican conservatism; and, currently, literary representations of 19th-Century Mexico.

These remain the same as those noted above under the Research Overview, i.e., Latin American political history, in particular 19th-Century Mexico.

Fowler has started work on a new project focused on literary representations of 19th-Century Mexico. He is interested, at present, in the way authors such as Manuel Payno and Ignacio Manuel Altamirano engaged with the main issues of the time and portrayed the so-called Age of Santa Anna and the Reforma Period in their novels.