One summer in the late 1980s, I drove from Nebraska to visit a friend on the campus of UT-Austin, and had an epiphany in which I knew that I wanted to become a historian and to live in Texas. Many years later, I am very happy to have made my way to TCU in the fulfillment of both goals. On the way, I earned a B.A. in history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, an M.A. at Tulane University and a Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, and spent a few years teaching European and Latin American history at Centenary College of Louisiana.

These days I spend much of my time in the seventeenth century, trying to channel the ghost of Calderón de la Barca and working on a book on the political aspects of popular theater in early modern Madrid. In general I am fond of all things Spanish: mostly those belonging to the past (the bewitched Charles II, the count-duke of Olivares, the comedia) but also morcilla, the Camino de Santiago and Iker Casillas. The only thing more fun than researching history is sharing it, so I teach survey courses in Western Civilization as well as upper-level classes in the Renaissance, early modern popular culture, and other aspects of early modern European history. I share a house with my two cats, Pinto and Valdemoro, and my husband, Juan Carlos Sola-Corbacho, who is also an accomplished historian but generally considers himself to be the third pet.

See Dr. Campbell's web page at http://personal.tcu.edu/~jcampbell