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Beginning his career in Massachusetts, Mark Christensen joined the History Department of Brigham Young University in 2018. He earned a BA from BYU, MA from the University of Utah, and a Ph.D. in 2010 from Penn State. As a Colonial Latin American Historian, his specialization includes Nahua (Aztec) and Maya ethnohistory in central Mexico and Yucatan, and the translation of Nahuatl and Maya texts. His various books, articles, and essays explore the colonial experience of Nahuas and Mayas and illustrate how they negotiated their everyday religious, economic, and social lives with Spanish colonialism. His most recent book, The Teabo Manuscript: Maya Christian Copybooks, Chilam Balams, and Native Text Production in Yucatan (2016), won the Latin American Studies Association Mexico Section Book Award in the Humanities. His current project, Return to Ixil: Maya Society in an Eighteenth-Century Yucatec Town (in press) employs over 100 last wills and testament in Maya to reveal new insights into the socioeconomic, religious, and even military experience of the Yucatec Maya. He lives in Mapleton, Utah, with his wife, Natalie, and their five children.

Classes

  • HIST 251: Conquest and Colonization of Latin America