Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Extremadura, he graduated in 1984 from the University of Oviedo, where he obtained a PhD five years later. He worked as a researcher and professor at the University of London between 1987 and 1991, and a year later at the Complutense University of Madrid, until 1992. His main lines of research are on the Second Spanish Republic, the Civil War and Spanish-British relations in the 1930s and 1940s; Francoism and the theory and methodology of History as a tradition and intellectual discipline. Among his dozens of publications, the most notable are the monographs Don Juan Negrín. Una biografía Política (2006); La semilla de la barbarie. Antisemitismo y Holocausto (2009); La guerra de España. Studies and controversies (2012); or the supervision of the book Las caras de Franco. Una revisión histórica del Caudillo y su régimen (2016). He led several research projects funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, and since 2016 he has been head of the Department of History at the University of Extremadura. He received numerous awards for his extensive research career, including the 2012 "Arturo Barea" Award for Cultural Research, conceded by the Badajoz Provincial Council for his Ensayo sobre Educación e Historia (published in 2013); Luis Romero Solano Award for “Historical Memory” for his studies of the figure of Juan Negrín; Award “The best book of the year 2005 (non-fiction category) of the magazine El Cultural for the book Franco against Churchill. Spain and Great Britain in the Second World War (2005). Finally, he was the winner of the 2017 National History Prize for his work Historia mínima de la Guerra Civil española.

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8480-5292