Marina Perez de Arcos
Marina Pérez de Arcos is a historian of twentieth-century international relations and an EU Global Fellow at Yale University’s MacMillan Center. Trained at Oxford, where she also earned her DPhil (doctorate), she has taught at Oxford, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and LSE-Forward College. Her award-winning research spans diplomacy, humanitarianism, European social democracy, among other fields. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, she has held positions worldwide and divides her time between New Haven, London, and Vienna.
Her teaching career spans over a decade, covering undergraduate and graduate courses from advanced European integration and Cold War history to Introduction to Political Science and Crisis and Decision-Making in the Twentieth Century. She served as founding Head of History and Politics and Head of Institutional Relations at LSE-Forward College’s newly established European campuses in Lisbon, Paris, and Berlin, and has been recognised with LSE’s Best Teacher Award. At Oxford, she was the first Fellow of Hispanic origin at the Rothermere American Institute and founding Coordinator of Spanish Studies, leading alumni engagement, research, and public outreach initiatives.
Marina’s research draws on archival and oral history sources from over twenty countries. Her first book examines Spain’s international opening and repositioning during the last decade of the Cold War and its first full decade as a democracy, with a focus on its relations across Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Her second book is part of her own EU-funded projects, EUHuman and EUHumanPlus: European Humanitarian Networks during the Great War, which explore continuities and shifts in humanitarianism across the First and Second World Wars. They have been supported by European Union Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe, and UKRI grants and conducted at the University of Venice, Oxford, and University College London.
Her publications cover a wide range of topics, including internment, NATO, global intellectual history, British cultural diplomacy, Spanish humanitarianism, and the evolution of European social democracy. They have appeared in journals spanning history, international relations, and area studies, such as Contemporary European History, Global Studies Quarterly, Cold War Studies, Bulletin of Spanish Studies (awarded Best Article of the Year, 2021), Hispanic Research Journal, International History Review, and First World War Studies. She has also contributed policy-relevant work, including service at La Moncloa Presidential Palace as a G20 sherpa and regular op-eds on historical and political affairs in one of Spain’s leading newspapers.
Marina’s scholarship has earned distinctions including the German Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation Research Award and the Elizabeth Greenhalgh Emerging Female Scholar Award from the International First World War Studies Society. She serves on the editorial boards of Immigrants & Minorities and the Bulletin of Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, and co-founded the Historians of Cultural Diplomacy Research Network.
She is a trustee of several charities and learned societies, including the British-Spanish Society (Head of Scholarships), the German History Society (Secretary), and the Society for the History of War. She co-chairs the Oxford and Cambridge Society in Austria and co-led the project Global Thinkers of the International, shortlisted for the Oxford Vice-Chancellor’s Diversity Award.
Marina speaks and works in Spanish, English, French, German, Portuguese, and Italian. She enjoys theatre—having founded a company during her student days at Oxford—and writing about her travels.