Jesús Escobar, who holds a PhD from Princeton University, is Professor of Art History at Northwestern University and editor of the scholarly book series ‘Buildings, Landscapes, and Societies’, published by Penn State University Press. A scholar of art, architecture, and urbanism in early modern Spain and the larger Spanish Habsburg world, he has focused on the political and spatial evolution of Madrid from a secondary city of Castile to the seat of a global empire in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He is the author of the award-winning book The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid (2003).