Faculty by Research Specialization

Research Interests

Mexico and Latin America; religion; political culture; history of time; bioprospecting and history of medicine

Biography, Education and Training

Ph. D. University of California, San Diego

B.A., University of California, Berkeley

Honors, Awards and Grants

National Endowment for the Humanities, Public Scholar, 2023-24

American Council of Learned Societies, Fellowship, 2013-14

American Philosophical Society, Franklin Research Grant, 2013-14

Kimberly S. Hanger Article Prize, 2013

Thomas McGann Award (book prize), 2010

James Alexander Robertson Memorial Prize for best article, American Historical Association-Conference on Latin American History, 2007

National Endowment for the Humanities, Faculty Research Award, 2005-6

Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in American Indian Studies, The Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, 2004-2005

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, The John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, R.I., 2004

Selected Publications

• Books
• The History of the Future in Colonial Mexico (Yale University Press, 2018).
• A Flock Divided: Race, Religion, and Politics in Mexico, 1749-1857 (Duke University Press, 2010).
• Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America, co-edited with Andrew Fisher (Duke University Press, 2009)
• Articles
• "The Shadows of Curare: Histories and pre-Histories of Pharmaceutical Research in the Amazon," History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals 63, no. 2 (2022): 247-269. 
• "How to Read the Rock Face?: Getting Old in the Archive of Postcolonial Mexico," Hispanic American Historical Review 102, no. 3 (2022): 387-414.
• "Time and Christianity in Early Latin America," in Oxford Handbook of Latin American Christianity, eds. Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, David Orique, and Manuel Vásquez (Oxford University Press, 2019): 23-38.
• "Confession and the Art of Reading," in Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America: Synoptic Methods and Practices, eds. Karen Melvin and Sylvia Sellers-García (University of New Mexico Press, 2017)
• "Anxiety and the Future at Mexican Independence," in Emotions and Daily Life in Colonial Mexico, eds. Sonya Lipsett-Rivera and Javier Villa-Flores (University of New Mexico Press, 2014): 198-220.
• "The History of Time in Colonial Latin America," History Compass 11, no. 1 (2013): 77-88.
• "The Supple Whip: Innovation and Tradition in Mexican Catholicism," American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (2012): 1373-1401.
• “El capital espiritual y la política local: la ciudad de México y curatos rurales en el México central,” in Religión, Política e Identidad en la Independencia de México, ed. Brian Connaughton (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa, 2010).
• "The Orthodox Underworld of Colonial Mexico," Colonial Latin American Review 17, no. 2 (2008): 233-250.
• “Racial Identities and Their Interpreters in Colonial Latin America” (co-authored with Andrew Fisher) in Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America, Matthew O’Hara and Andrew Fisher, eds. (Duke University Press, 2009): 1-34.
• “Miserables and Citizens: Indians, Legal Pluralism, and Religious Practice in Early Republican Mexico” in Religious Culture in Modern Mexico, ed. Martin Nesvig (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007): 14-34.
• “Stone, Mortar, and Memory: Church Construction and Communities in Late Colonial Mexico City” Hispanic American Historical Review 86:4 (2006): 647-680.
• “Politics and Piety: The Church in Colonial and Nineteenth-Century Mexico,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 17:1 (2001): 213-231.