Professor Will Fowler: A cracking good hombre

Amanda Skinner

Friday 1 May 2026

When Will Fowler joined the Spanish department as a lecturer in 1995,  the department was very traditional in its approach to teaching and learning. Professor Gustavo San Román was the main Latin Americanist, but otherwise the focus was strongly on Castilian language and literature. The appointment of Will Fowler as lecturer changed that, both in tone and in intellectual direction.  

From the outset, he brought a sense of theatre into the classroom. In the days before email and online portals, the School noticeboard was the central hub for information,  reading lists,  and deadlines.  Will added a characteristic flourish: “’Pedro Páramo, a cracking good read’ – Will Fowler. “Essays due week five.” It was a small gesture, but one that captured his instinct to animate literature and engage students.  

That instinct had deep roots.  With an undergraduate degree in Drama and Spanish from Bristol University,  Will had initially imagined a life on stage. Studying alongside contemporaries such as Emily Watson, Mathew Warchus – who went on to direct the Royal Shakespeare Company – and David Nicholls – author of One Day – he soon recognised that his talents lay elsewhere.  “The star of a school play does not necessarily translate to the star of a Broadway show,”  he reflects.  The shift away from acting, however, did not mean abandoning storytelling; rather, it redirected it.  

He stayed on at Bristol to pursue a PhD in Mexican Studies under Professor Michael P. Costeloe, a path that took him to Mexico to research the life of José María de Tornel y Mendívil, whose loyalty to Santa Anna led him to play a crucial role in enabling the leader’s rise to power in the mid-nineteenth century.  

It was there that a scholarly interest deepened into something more enduring and,  not having yet completed his PhD,  he took up a position as a lecturer in Spanish at Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University).  His engagement with Mexico – its history, politics, and culture – became a lifelong passion, one he has shared generously and infectiously with students and colleagues ever since: “Graham Greene once said that Mexico was something he couldn’t shake off,  ‘like a state of mind’.  And that’s exactly what it’s been like for me.  There’s not a day that goes by that I’m not thinking, reading,  writing or talking to students about Mexico.”   

His arrival at St Andrews, he recalls, was largely a matter of chance. “The Department was advertising for a position that ranged from lecturer to professor, so the gamut was quite wide,  and knowing there was an internal candidate, I didn’t really rate my chances. But I brought my young family along anyway, telling them that if nothing else it would be a pleasant trip to a beautiful place.”  Ultimately,  two appointments were made: Nigel Dennis(1949-2013) as professor,  and Will as lecturer.  

Will’s own beginnings were similarly shaped by movement between cultures. He grew up in Barcelona, the son of an English father – a renowned author of English as a Second Language textbooks – and a Spanish mother.  Educated initially in Spanish, he spent summers in England to improve his English. “It didn’t look very good for the son of an ESL author to have limited English-speaking abilities,” he laughs.   

Those early experiences fostered both a love of language and a readiness to cross borders, intellectual as well as geographical. They also fed his early creative ambitions. “I originally wanted to be a novelist and thought a career in academia would give me the time to pursue that,” he says, with a wry smile.  “Of course, with three children and a full schedule, that didn’t exactly work out.”  

After years in larger cities, the move to St Andrews proved less of a culture shock than one might expect. He quickly embraced the rhythms of the town – the long summer days, the beaches, its friendliness and sense of safety – as well as its lively cultural life and close-knit academic community: “What a privileged existence! To be able to spend every day with inspired and inspiring colleagues and students in one of the most beautiful corners in the world!”   

He also found ways to build a community of his own. “I started a six-a-side football team which played with other local and university teams in a league,” he recalls. “The team was called Español because we all only spoke Spanish when we played. It created quite a different dynamic with the other local teams –and it was great fun!”  

Will was tenured as a Professor in 2006,  and for many years his ambition to be a novelist remained in the background, expressed indirectly through his teaching and scholarship.  Will has published prolifically in his field and is a member of the Academia Mexicana de la Historia, and Co-Director of the c19c Cross Cultural Nineteenth Century Research Centre.  Yet the impulse to tell stories – first through theatre, then through history – never quite left him. More recently, it has come to the fore.  

His first novel,  Patriotas, published in 2024, draws directly on his academic expertise: a sweeping Mexican family saga set in the nineteenth century. It was quickly followed by Traidores, due to be published in August 2026, which turns closer to home for inspiration. Based in part on his grandmother’s story, it explores the tensions of class, family, and displacement in early twentieth-century Spain. Born into payeses, the rural classes outside Barcelona, she was sent to live with a couple in the city and raised in a middle-class environment—an experience that created lasting divisions with both her siblings and her parents, whom she felt had effectively sold her off. In Traidores, these emotional fault lines are reimagined within a fictional family set against the upheaval of the Mexican 1910 revolution.  

He is currently completing a third novel based around the time of Maximilian, the Austrian prince installed as Emperor of Mexico in 1864. Drawing on the persistent conspiracy theory that Maximilian survived his execution in 1867 and lived out his days in El Salvador, the novel again blends historical research with imaginative reconstruction.   

In many ways, it brings together the different strands of Will’s life: his training as a historian, his academic work on Mexico, and the creative ambitions first sparked in the theatre. The result is not a departure from his academic career, but a culmination of it—storytelling, at last, returned to centre stage and will no doubt be a cracking good read.