Search:   This Site | People | Departments | Penn State
Penn State MarkHistory & Religious Studies

Department Faculty

Matthew Restall

Matthew Restall, Professor of Colonial Latin American History, Anthropology and Women's Studies and Director of Latin American Studies

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, go to http://www3.la.psu.edu/las/graphics/7M-Master.mp3), while I have also received NEH and Guggenheim fellowships to study people of African descent in colonial Mexico and Yucatan. In 2005 I published three books: a Spanish edition of Seven Myths; an edited volume on 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 am currently writing a history of African slaves and free people of African descent in colonial Yucatan, focusing on issues of society and culture, and the nature of relations between Afro-Yucatecans, Spaniards, and Mayas.”

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