Tikal, Guatemala

I am Associate Professor of Latin American history at the University of Arizona. My research focuses on colonial Guatemala and Mexico, Mesoamerican ethnohistory, the history of medicine and healing, religion, and gender studies.


I am the author of Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala, (University of Texas Press, 2002). This work will be published in Spanish translation as Mujeres de mal vivir: Género, religión, y las políticas de poder en la Guatemala colonial. Plumsock Mesoamerican Studies, in cooperation with the Maya Educational Foundation and CIRMA (Guatemala City, Guatemala: Editorial Universitaria de San Carlos), forthcoming.


Some recent journal articles and book chapters that I have published include "'That Monster of Nature': Gender, Sexuality, and the Medicalization of a 'Hermaphrodite' in Late Colonial Guatemala," special issue "Sexual Encounters/Sexual Collisions: Alternative Sexualities in Colonial Mesoamerica," Ethnohistory 54:1 (Winter 2007), pp. 159-176; "'Our Lord Entered His Body': Miraculous Healing and Children's Bodies in Colonial New Spain," in Susan Schroeder and Stafford Poole, eds. Religion in New Spain (University of New Mexico Press, 2007), pp. 114-124; "'El daño que hace el bien común': Casta revendedoras y los conflictos generados por la venta de carne en Guatemala colonial, 1650-1720," Mesoamérica 49 (2007), pp. 1-24, and "Chocolate, Sex, and Disorderly Women in Late-Seventeenth and Early-Eighteenth-Century Guatemala," Ethnohistory 52:4 (fall 2005), pp. 673-687.


My current research will result in a new book, All of Humanity: Colonial Guatemala and New World Medical Cultures Before the Smallpox Vaccine. I am also working on an edited volume with Zeb Totorici (UCLA), Centering Animals: Writing Animals into Latin American History.


My main teaching areas are colonial and modern Latin America, Central America, Mexico, gender studies, ethnohistory, medicine and healing, comparative colonialism, and historiography. In the fall of 2008, I teach HIST 301: Introduction to the Study of History, a methodology class for undergraduate history majors, and HIST 695B, a graduate colloquium on Latin American Ethnohistory. I will be on research leave during spring semester 2009.


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