Gabriel Guarino holds a PhD from Cambridge University and is a lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Ulster. He has various publications on the Spanish expansion and its socio-cultural influence in Europe and the Americas, on the cultural history of European princely courts and on the African-American Diaspora. He is the author of Representing the King’s Splendour: Communication and Reception of Symbolic Forms of Power in Viceregal Naples (2010) and is presently working on a comparative study of the Viceregal courts of Spain.