Juan León

Juan Fernando León Báez is a historian of Colonial Latin America and the Iberian Atlantic World whose research focuses on climate history at the intersection of science, religion, and culture. Focusing on Spain and Mexico, he examines how early modern and colonial societies made environmental uncertainty intelligible and transformed climatic information into quotidian practices of anticipation, adaptation, and collective response.

His current book project, Weather Soundings: Vernacular Meteorology in Spain and Mexico during the Little Ice Age, investigates how climatic volatility reshaped the production, circulation, and use of meteorological knowledge across the Iberian Atlantic. It traces how weather information moved between learned traditions and local experience, becoming credible, practical, and socially consequential for communities responding to climate extremes.

His broader research interests include early modern climate change, histories of knowledge-making and science, hydrosocial relations, and the blue humanities. His publications examine Iberian weather forecasting and the urban waterscapes of early modern Lisbon, exploring how climate variability, natural philosophy, infrastructure, and social inequality shaped lived experience. His articles have appeared in Water History and the Cambridge Journal of Climate Research.

León Báez received his PhD in History from Northwestern University, where he later served as a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies. He currently teaches Latin American and Iberian history in a comparative Atlantic perspective at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.