FEATURED AUTHOR
Fernando Collantes
Fernando Collantes is a historical political economist who started his research career working on rural depopulation and rural development in Spain and other parts of Europe. More recently, he has also done research on food systems, consumer society, and agricultural policy. He is strongly committed to interdisciplinarity, as well as to making academic work more relevant for public debates. He has been teaching socio-economic history at faculties of Economics and Business for the last 20 years.
Subjects: Economics, Finance, Business & Industry, History
Biography
Fernando Collantes (born 1976) was trained as a mainstream economist at the University of Cantabria, but moved into the field of economic and social history as a graduate student in the late 1990s. His doctoral dissertation was about the depopulation of Spain's mountain areas from 1850 to 2000 and his early post-doctoral work extended that approach to other rural areas in Spain and Europe. By the time he completed his PhD, he had already moved to the University of Zaragoza, where he would become an Associate Professor in 2008. After having written two books on rural depopulation and rural development, he felt that a change would do him good and started a new line of research on consumer society, focusing on dairy products in Spain since the 1950s as an initial study case. His plans to move this project forward have been happily frustrated by a number of parallel initiatives, among them a monograph on the European Union's agricultural policy and a textbook on Spain's socio-economic history. The approach of historical political economy (influenced among others by Joseph Schumpeter, Thorstein Veblen, Paul Bairoch, Fernand Braudel and Eric Hobsbawm) has allowed Collantes to study the economic in its social and ethical context, as well as to stress the role played by long-run dynamics in socio-economic systems. In 2020, he moved from the University of Zaragoza to the University of Oviedo, where he is currently an Associate Professor of Economic and Social History. As a trustee of the Spanish Economic History Association, Collantes runs a bi-weekly podcast series intended to make socio-economic history more accessible to non-academic audiences.Education
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Degree in Economics, University of Cantabria (1998)
Ph.D. in Economics, University of Cantabria (2003)
Personal Interests
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Collantes' very conventional interests include music, films, and literature. His heroes in these areas include Bruce Springsteen, Antonín Dvorák, Kenneth Branagh, Stefan Zweig, and many more. He dreams that one day, when his three children grow older, he will learn how to play piano and how to use a golf club properly.
Books
