Matthew Restall, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Colonial Latin American History, Anthropology and Women's Studies;
Co-director of LiLACS and Director of Latin American Studies; member of the Committee for Early Modern Studies (CEMS);
editor of Ethnohistory journal;
series editor for Latin American Originals
216 Weaver
814-865-1121
mxr40@psu.edu
Field
Colonial Latin America
I am a Colonial Latin American historian with areas of specialization in colonial Yucatan, Mexico, Maya history, the Spanish Conquest, and Africans in Spanish America. During the 1990s my research focused on studying the Mayas of Yucatan through sources written in the Yucatec Maya language between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries; this work culminated in my books The Maya World (1997) and Maya Conquistador (1998). More recently, my research on the Conquest has been published as Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (2003) (for a podcast on this book, please click here ) , and Invading Guatemala (2007). In 2005 I published spanish and Portuguese editions of Seven Myths; an edited volume of relations between Africans and Native peoples in Colonial Latin America, titled Beyond Black and Red; and a co-authored volume called Mesoamerican Voices, reflecting my ongoing interest in indigenous societies in colonial Mexico, Guatemala, and Yucatan. I have received NEH and Guggenheim fellowships to study people of African descent in Mexico and Yucatan, and my book, The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan will be published in 2009.
Undergraduate Courses
The Atlantic World in Early Modern Times
Colonial Voices: Spaniards, Africans, and Native Americans
Culture, Race, and Social Structure in Colonial Latin America
Social History of Mexico
Maya History
Culture and Conquest in Spanish America
Empires
Graduate Courses
Ethnohistory and Afrohistory
Ethnohistory: Colonial Mesoamerican Societies
Colonial Latin American Social History
Marriage and Society in Colonial Mexico
Race and Gender in Latin America
An Introduction to Nahuatl and Maya
Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest
Cohesion and Dissent in Latin American Societies, Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries
Curriculum Vitae | Return to directory of department faculty