Juan Avilés Farré (1950) is a Spanish historian, Professor of Contemporary History at UNED.

PhD in History from the Complutense University in 1981. Professor of the Department of Contemporary History of the UNED from 1987 to 1996. Professor of the same department since 1996. Professor emeritus since 2020.

In 1985 he published The bourgeois left in the Second Republic, a book that brought together his doctoral thesis directed by Javier Tusell. Tusell himself prefaced the book, praising Avilés' handling of the sources, his comparison with other countries or the analysis of the paper of freemasonry

In 1994 he published Passion and farce. French and British before the Spanish Civil War, in which he maintains the thesis that the United Kingdom and France had "a major influence" on the development of the Spanish War, but "much more because of what they stopped doing than for what they did." He considers that the French position of non-intervention was marked by its internal political division, by its serious financial crisis that made it dependent on the Anglo-Saxon countries and by the need to rely on the United Kingdom in its international action. However, he highlights the importance of French permissiveness in 1938, when he allowed Soviet war materiel to cross his territory bound for the Republican side. As for the British, he considers that they always maintained the criterion that "the victory of one side or the other in Spain was secondary to the fundamental question of preventing the conflict from giving rise to a European war." This appeasement started from the erroneous base that Hitler was pursuing partial objectives, when, in fact, he was looking for total ones.Criticism has particularly praised the treatment of press and propaganda issues.

In 2006, Avilés published Francisco Ferrer y Guardia. Pedagogue, anarchist and martyr, a biography of the famous libertarian pedagogue. Critics praised the book's low bias, unusual in the bibliography on the character, as well as the development of a complete synthesis about a multifaceted character.

In the same year, The Bourgeois Left and the Tragedy of the Second Republic saw the light of day, a book that reworked his previous The Bourgeois Left in the Second Republic. In it, he analyzes the left-wing bourgeois parties during the last years of the reign of Alfonso XIII and the Second Republic. He studies the influence of the Republican Action Group, the Republican Alliance and the Radical Socialist Republican Party in the fall of the Dictatorship and of the monarchy itself, the reform work carried out during the first republican biennium, its opposition work during the second biennium, the influence of the Freemasonry and the final confrontation between two radicalized blocks in the 1936 elections.

His work is also The dagger and the dynamite: the anarchists and the birth of terrorism (2013), —in which, according to Isidoro Gilbert, Avilés Farré proposes a continuity between the anarchist movements of the 19th century and the jihadism of the 21st century— , in addition to the biography of the communist leader Dolores Ibárruri "Pasionaria", Pasionaria: the woman and the myth (2005) or Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the end of an era (2011), among others.

In recent years he has focused on the international history of terrorism. In 2013 he published The Dagger and the Dynamite: Anarchists and the Birth of Terrorism. According to the historian Eduardo González Calleja, this book has the virtue of presenting the Spanish case both in its own dimensions and in relation to the international anarchist movement, and due to its erudition and interpretive ambition it is a reference work in the international history of terrorism.

According to the historian Carmen López Alonso, this work exposes the history of jihadism in a synthetic and didactic way, with a broader scope than its title indicates, since the exhibition is not limited to showing the evolution that goes from Al Qaeda to Dáesh , but it begins with a useful introduction that explains how a historical investigation works, the need to start from contrasted documentation to be able to carry out an analysis based on a clear conceptual definition, so essential in a subject like this in the that unsubstantiated opinions tend to prevail. The title of the book already makes this conceptual precision clear, since it does not use the Islamic term, but refers to jihadist terrorism, the one whose justifying discourse of violence "is not found in the Islamic tradition itself but in a reinterpretation of it carried out through mid-20th century by the work of a current that is usually called jihadist Salafism".

In 2021 he published The Strategy of Tension: Neofascist Terrorism and Coup Plots in Italy, 1969-1980. According to the historian Matteo Re, this book analyzes an endless number of documents, thousands of pages of sentences and an extensive bibliography