Department of Anthropology

Penn State University

Matthew B. Restall

Edwin ErLe Sparks Professor of Colonial LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY, ANTHROPOLOGY and WOMEN'S STUDIES, director of graduate studies in history; director of latin american studies

Office: 108D Weaver Building
Telephone: (814) 865-1641 Fax: (814) 863-7840
Email: mxr40@psu.edu
Curriculum Vitae

 

Latin American Studies

 
 

 

EDUCATION:

University of California, Los Angeles

  • Ph.D., Colonial Mexican History, 9/1992,
  • MA, Latin American History, 3/1989

Oxford University, England

  • Honorary MA, Modern History, 6/1989
  • BA, Honors, First Class, Modern History, 6/1986

RESEARCH ACTIVITIES AND INTERESTS:

Matthew Restall was educated in Oxford and UCLA, and is now Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Latin American History at Penn State. His areas of specialization are colonial Yucatan and Mexico, Maya history, the Spanish Conquest, and Africans in Spanish America. Since 1995 he has published over thirty articles & essays and nine books, including The Maya World (Stanford, 1997), Maya Conquistador (Beacon, 1998), and Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (Oxford, 2003). He received NEH Fellowships for 1997-98 & 2001-02, and a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2003-04 to write a history of Afro-Yucatecans, to be published by Stanford University Press in 2008 as The Black Middle. His most recent books are an edited volume titled Beyond Black and Red (Albuquerque, 2005), and two co-authored volumes-Mesoamerican Voices (Cambridge, 2005) and Invading Guatemala, published in 2007 in Penn State Press' new Latin American Originals series. He is editor of this series, and also the new co-editor of Ethnohistory journal.

COURSES TAUGHT:

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

For a listing of publications, please see Dr. Restall's curriculum vitae