Jaime Olmedo Ramos Elected Full Member of Royal Academy of History of Spain
Jaime Olmedo, a distinguished and longstanding member of the Cultural Committee of the QSSI, was elected by the Royal Academy of History of Spain to fill seat number 20 as a full member.
Jaime Olmedo Ramos has been elected by the Royal Academy of History (RAH) to become a full member of the venerable institution. The RAH was founded in 1738 through a Royal Charter issued by King Felipe V. Olmedo will fill seat number 20, out of the Academy’s 36 seats, which has been vacant since the passing of Fernando Díaz Esteban, a historian and scholar of the History of Jews of Spain. Olmedo’s candidacy was presented by full members Luis Ribot García, Luis Alberto de Cuenca y Prado and Amparo Alba Cecilia. He is the latest full member to be elected since the 2024 election of Pablo Emilio Perez Mallaína Bueno and Juan Francisco Fuentes Aragonés.
Olmedo is currently the President of the Camilo José Cela University, a private university based in the region of Madrid. He has worked with the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute on various projects over the year within his capacity as member of the Cultural Advisory Committee and his previous role as Technical Director of the Royal Academy of History. These projects included the presentations of the Electronic Biographical Dictionary of the Royal Academy of History in New York City and in Miami, aboard the Juan Sebastián de Elcano, the Spanish Navy Training Ship, and the first presentation in the United States of the Portal of Hispanic History, an immense tool that has geolocated over 50,000 biographies and 20,000 events key to understanding the history of Spain. All three of these presentations were presided over by Her Majesty Queen Sofía, an Academic of Honor of the Royal Academy of History and Patroness of the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute. Jaime Olmedo also presented the Portal of Hispanic History at the annual conference of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies in Boulder, Colorado in 2023.
The mission of the Royal Academy of History as established by the Royal Charter issued by King Felipe V in 1738 is to clarify “the important truth of events, banishing the fables introduced by ignorance or malice, leading to the knowledge of many things that antiquity has obscured or that neglect has buried.” The Royal Academy of History’s director has been Carmen Iglesias since her appointment in 2014.
Biography
Olmedo holds a degree in Hispanic Philology with Extraordinary Prize from the Complutense University of Madrid, a degree with lode in Italian Philology from the University of Bologna (Italy), and Olmedo is a Doctor summa cum laude in Philosophy and Letters from the University of Bologna. He completed his doctoral thesis at the Royal College of Spain in Bologna, where he was dean of the institution (1996-1997). He holds postgraduate degrees in Cultural Management from the UOC and took courses in Cultural Heritage from Harvard University and in Educational Technology from MIT in Massachusetts.
Between 1998 and 2002 he was a member of the Academic Direction of the Instituto Cervantes where he was coordinator and editorial advisor of the institution’s annual report: El español en el mundo. He was part of the team that translated and adapted the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (Council of Europe-Modern Language Division, Strasbourg, 2001).
From 2000 to 2002 he coordinated the Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts (2005) at the Royal Spanish Academy, on behalf of the Cervantes Institute.
From March 2002 until October 2024, he was Technical Director of the Spanish Biographical Dictionary (50 vols.) of the Royal Academy of History, and in 2018 of its electronic version, which received the Quality Innovation Award (QIA) 2018 in the Educational Sector category. Also at the Royal Academy of History, he directed the portal “Historia Hispánica,” distinguished in 2024 with the award for the best digitization project of the Spanish Administration granted by the National Association of the Technology Industry (ASLAN).
Since October 2024, he has been President of the Camilo José Cela University in Madrid.
He is a corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and Historical Sciences of Toledo and the Royal Academy of Sciences, Fine Arts and Noble Arts of Cordoba.
He has received the VII Complutense Award in the Humanities (1996), the Gold Master of the Fórum de Alta Dirección (2010) and the “Fernando de Rojas” Award for Arts and Letters (2011).
Jaime Olmedo holds the Official Cross of Civil Merit (2017).
Between 2010 and 2024, he served as professor of Spanish Literature at the Complutense University of Madrid, where he received the Diploma of Teaching Excellence.
He has been invited to international conferences in his specialty and has lectured at European and North American universities.
In the institutional field, he is vice-president of the Duques de Soria Foundation, member of the Cultural Committee of the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute of New York, of the Advisory Council of the Ortega Marañón Foundation, of the Council of the D. Luís I Foundation of Portugal and member of the Board of Trustees of the Río Tinto Foundation and of the Camilo José Cela Foundation.
He is the author of 10 books on History of Literature, more than a hundred articles and book chapters in collective works and has edited texts from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. He has been a literary critic for ABC Cultural and Revista de Occidente.
He is a member of Editorial and Scientific Boards and Editorial Committees of several publications.
