The Team
Deciphering Secrets is led by Prof. Dr. Roger L. Martinez-Davila.
Roger is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado and holds a Ph.D. in medieval European history and global medieval history from the University of Texas at Austin and a Master of Public Policy from the University of California-Berkeley. His first monograph, Creating Conversos: The Carvajal-Santa María Family in Early Modern Spain (2018), is published by the University of Notre Dame Press. In Creating Conversos, he unravels the complex story of Jews who converted to Catholicism in Spain between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, migrated to colonial Mexico and Bolivia during the conquest of the Americas, and assumed prominent church and government positions. Rather than acting as alienated and marginalized subjects, the conversos were able to craft new identities and strategies not just for survival but for prospering in the most adverse circumstances.
Roger served as a Marie Curie Fellow 2015-2018 and continues to implement his European Commission research project, Global Citizen Scholars: Energizing English and Spanish- Speaking Humanists to Advance KÑowledge and Act (GCS – EESSPHAÑA), at the Universidad de Carlos III de Madrid. GCS is a global research, educational, and social engineering endeavor that employs MOOCs to teach medieval Spanish history as well as train tens of thousands of students to perform original transcription of medieval manuscripts from Spanish archival collections. This initiative continues at the Deciphering Secrets project website. Roger offers MOOCs on the www.coursera.org platform via his University of Colorado affiliation.
His exploration of issues of religious co-existence extends in the realm of public history. Specifically, he served as a Guest Curator for The New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is the official state history museum located in the historic Palace of the Governors.
As co-curator of Fractured Faiths: Spanish Judaism, The Inquisition, and New World Identities, which opened May 22, 2016 (through Dec. 31, 2016), he identified, researched, and selected 150+ objects and art works for inclusion in the exhibition, as well as coauthored the majority of the museum exhibition’s narrative and object labels. The exhibit was logistically challenging as we loaned objects from over twenty-five institutions and private collectors in Spain, Mexico, and the United States, including the Museo Sefardi (Toledo, Spain); Biblioteca Nacional de España; the Archivo General de la Nacion (Mexico City); the Museo Franz Meyer (Mexico City); the Hispanic Society of America (NY); the Jewish Museum of New York; and the Bancroft Library (Berkeley). In addition, he co-edited and authored the exhibition catalogue that includes an introductory essay, five scholarly papers, and a discussion of the principal objects included in the exhibit. The exhibition received positive reviews in the Albuquerque Journal and the Santa Fe New Mexican; over six-hundred persons attended the member opening on May 21, 2016.
In 2014, he created and co-directs the Revealing Cooperation and Conflict Project, which evaluates inter-religious relations in medieval Spain. The RCCP team of scholars from Spain, Switzerland, and the USA invigorates the humanities and public’s imagination by creating visually-compelling, data-robust, and historically-lush digital worlds like our Unity-based collaborative work, Virtual Plasencia (and our digital narration, “La Mota: A Christian Assumes Ownership over Jewish Homes, circa 1416”.
