Humanities Division
Provost, Cowell and Stevenson Colleges
Professor, History
Faculty
Latin American & Latino Studies
Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas
Cowell College Academic Building
121
Fall 25 -- Mondays 12-1 or via appointment
Humanities Academic Services
Ph. D. University of California, San Diego
B.A., University of California, Berkeley
Mexico and Latin America; religion; political culture; history of time; bioprospecting and history of medicine
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
- 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 / Book Chapters
- "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.