About

B.A., Boston University; Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley

BIOGRAPHY

I’m a scholar of colonial Mexico and the early modern Catholic world. I’m currently finishing a book about two of the first international charities: rescuing Christian captives from North Africa and maintaining a Catholic presence in the Holy Land. During the seventeenth through early-nineteenth centuries, New Spain provided more funds for these projects than anywhere else in the world, and I want to know what people there knew about these projects and why they might have cared. I’m also starting a new book project that follows the travels of Irish Dominican William “Guillermo” O’Brien to Rome, New York City, Havana, and Mexico City in order to show how movement through the Catholic empire around the turn of the nineteenth century helped shape our modern world.

My publications include:

• Building Colonial Cities of God: Mendicant Orders and Urban Culture in New Spain, 1570-1800. Stanford University Press, 2012
•  Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America: Essays on Methods and Practice. Co-edited with Sylvia Sellers-García, University of New Mexico Press, 2017
• Other articles and book chapters can be found here.
• I’m also a principal investigator for Reading the Inquisition, a collaborative digital history project that presents inquisition cases as original documents, Spanish transcriptions, and English translations.

TEACHING

My teaching encompasses a wide range of Latin America’s history from Aztecs to the present day, including courses open to all students:

HIST/LALS 181 Creating Latin America: A broad overview of Latin America from indigenous societies before the arrival of Europeans through 21st-century globalization.

HIST 214/LALS 215 Revolutionary Americas, 1765-1830: Professor Joe Hall and I team teach this class that examines struggles for independence throughout the American hemisphere, from Boston to Buenos Aires. 

HIST/LALS 270 The Spanish Empire: From Madrid to Manila: A history of early globalization through the lens of the first global empire.

HIST 295 / LALS 295 / REL 295  Montezuma’s Mexico: Aztecs and their World: Students learn about what life was like for people in the Aztec empire and beliefs about how the cosmos worked.  

HIST/LALS s27: The Mexican Revolution: Students debate issues from the first major social revolution of the 20th-century.  

 I also offer smaller seminar classes for sophomores, juniors, and seniors, including:

HIST 301Y / LALS 303 / REL 314 The Spanish Inquisition: Students use Inquisition cases—including for blasphemy, bigamy, and witchcraft—to better understand peoples and societies of Spain and New Spain.

HIST 301W/LALS301W: The Cold War in Latin America: Students research how revolutions, military coups and governments, wide-scale human rights violations, and civil wars shaped the region between the 1950s and the 1980s.

Curriculum Vitae