Conference Participants

Ted Beatty, the interim director of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, is an associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. His research interests include the economic and political history of 19th- and early 20th-century Mexico, technological change in Mexico, and the comparative study of institutions, technology transfer, and economic development. The author of Institutions and Investment: The Political Basis of Industrialization in Mexico before 1911 (Stanford University Press, 2001), Beatty has also published "Propiedad industrial, patentes e inversión en tecnología en España y México (1820–1914),” with Patricio Sáiz González, in Rafael Dobado, Aurora Gómez Galvarriato, and Graciela Márquez, eds., España y México: Historias Económicas Paralelas? (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007), among other works. He holds a PhD in history from Stanford University.

Christopher Boyer is Associate Professor of History and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he gives classes in Mexican history, environmental history, and Latin American Studies. His first book, Becoming Campesinos: Politics, Identity, and Agrarian Struggle in Postrevolutionary Michoacán, published by Stanford University Press, explains how the Mexican land reform influenced peasant culture in the 1920s and 1930s. His articles have appeared in the Latin American Historical Review, Historia Mexicana, the American Historical Review, and edited volumes released in Mexico and the U.S. He is now writing a book titled Crosscuts: Community, Regulation, and Moral Ecology of Forests in Mexico, 1880-2000 that will be released by Duke University Press in 2010.

Raymond Craib teaches in the Department of History at Cornell University. He is the author of Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Duke University Press, 2004) and is currently working on a history of the persecution of 'subversives' (anarchists, the IWW, and pacifists) in Chile in 1920.

Susan Gauss is an assistant professor at the University at Albany, SUNY, with a joint appointment in the Department of History and the Department of Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies.  She has published an article and a book chapter on gender and labor in postrevolutionary Mexico, and has a book entitled Made in Mexico: Regions, Nation, and the State in the Rise of Mexican Industrialism, 1920s-1940s forthcoming with Penn State University Press.

Benjamin Heber Johnson is Associate Professor of History at Southern Methodist University and Associate Director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies.  A native of Houston, Texas, he received a B.A. summa cum laude at Carleton College and a Ph.D. at Yale University.  He was a postdoctoral instructor at the California Institute of Technology and an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio before coming to SMU in 2002.  His primary areas of research and teaching include environmental history, North American borders, Texas history, and western history.  He is author of Revolution in Texas:  How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (Yale University Press, 2003), Bordertown:  The Odyssey of an American Place (Yale University Press, 2008), and several journal and anthology articles on environmental politics in the early twentieth-century United States.  His edited volumes include Steal this University:  The Labor Movement and the Corporatization of Higher Education (Routledge, 2003), The Making of the American West (ABC-CLIO, 2007), and Bridging National Borders in North America (Duke University Press, 2010).  He is the recipient of the Popular Culture/American Culture Association’s Browne Award for Bordertown, the Ralph Hidy award for the best article in the journal Environmental History, and grants from the Huntington Library, Marshall/Baruch Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies.  Johnson is currently researching a book on American environmentalism in the early 20th century.

Rick López is Associate Professor of History and of Environmental Studies at Amherst College. His research on Mexican national cultural integration won the Best Dissertation Award from the New England Council of Latin American Studies and the James A. Robertson Best Article Prize from the Conference of Latin American Studies. His published works include a coedited volume on violence and political marginalization in southern Mexico, six articles, and Crafters of Nationhood: How Intellectuals, Artisans and the State created an Ethnicized Mexican National Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming 2009). His next book, Science, Nationalism, and Aesthetics in the Shaping of Mexico's Environmental Imagination (book monograph in progress), analyzes how Mexicans have understood their own environment historically and why their ideas have or have not resulted in policy for sustainability.

Mark Overmyer-Velázquez is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Connecticut-Storrs. His first book, Visions of the Emerald City: Modernity, Tradition and the Formation of Porfirian Oaxaca, Mexico (Duke 2006), won the 2007 Best Book Prize from the New England Council on Latin American Studies and was a finalist for the 2007 Urban History Association Kenneth Jackson Award for Best Book in North American Urban History. His current work examines themes in the transnational history of migration between Mexico and the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present day. He has initiated work on two new related book projects: "Bleeding Mexico White": Race, Nation and the History of Mexico - US Migration (Duke, American Encounters/Global Interactions Series) and as editor, Beyond the Border: The History of Mexico-US Migration (Oxford). He is also editor of the two volume series, Latino America: State by State (Greenwood 2008).

Dr. Eric Van Young  (Ph.D., UC Berkeley 1978) taught at the University of Texas-Austin before coming to the  Department of History, University of California, San Diego, where he is Professor of History.  He has chaired his department, served as Associate Director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, and was Interim Dean of Arts and Humanities at UCSD during 2007 and 2008.  Van Young has also taught as a visiting professor in Mexico, Spain, and France, and has lectured widely.  Recently he was inducted as a Corresponding Member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences.  He has published nearly seventy journal articles and book chapters, and is author, editor, or co-editor of nine books.  His most recent major published work, The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Struggle for Mexican Independence, 1810-1821 (Stanford University Press, 2001; Spanish translation, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006), won the Bolton-Johnson Prize of the Conference on Latin American History for the best book on Latin American history published during 2001.  A volume of his essays on historical methodology and historiography is due to be published in 2009 by a consortium of Mexican academic presses including the Colegio de San Luis Potosí, the Colegio de Michoacán, and the Mexico City research institute CIESAS, and another collection will be published by Stanford University Press.   A specialist on the history of colonial and 19th-century Mexico and Latin America more generally, he is currently researching a biography of the 19th-century Mexican statesman, entrepreneur, and historian Lucas Alamán.