Juan Vargas Hernandez

Juan Vargas is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of Notre Dame studying the political, social, and military aftermath of the Atlantic Revolutions. His research focuses on royalism and the transition from empire to republic in New Granada during the first half of the nineteenth century. His dissertation examines how individuals and communities associated with the Spanish monarchy responded to military defeat, political exclusion, and the consolidation of republican rule. Rather than treating independence as a clean rupture, his work traces the persistence and transformation of royalist networks across periods of war, exile, and regime change.

 

He is particularly interested in the relationship between revolution and counterrevolution, warfare and military mobilization, migration and exile, political identity, and the strategies through which defeated political communities adapted to new states. His research follows military, clerical, administrative, and familial networks across New Granada, Venezuela, the Caribbean, and the wider Iberian world, emphasizing the circulation of people, ideas, and political loyalties across imperial and national boundaries. His broader interests include military history, the history of empire and de-colonization, the Iberian Atlantic, royalism and counterrevolution, and transimperial networks in the nineteenth century.