Lean Sweeney

Lean Sweeney's research focuses on the impact of theories of space, law and post-colonial borderlands on the creation of nations, citizens, race and criminality in Mexico and Central America. Her first book,  Supervivencia de los bandidos: los mayas icaichés y la política fronteriza del sureste de Yucatán, 1847-1904, was published in Spanish in Mexico with the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, in 2006. Her second book, Emigrados: Migration, Expulsion and Transnational Politics in Nineteenth Century Mexico and Guatemala, is currently under review with the University of North Carolina Press, David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History.  She is currently working on a third project, Rights without Rites: Concubines in the Post-Colony, examining concubinage in nineteenth-century Guatemala.  Sweeney has also published on Maximilian of Habsburg's execution in nineteenth-century Mexico and her collaborative research on gender-based violence in Mexico and Central America can be found on Libra, the University of Virginia's open-access repository.

Dr. Sweeney has extensive experience teaching undergraduate history courses in Modern Latin America, Latin American Popular Culture, Modern Central America, Latin American Film,  Latin American Borderlands, Race and State in Mexico, Human Rights in Latin America and Gender, Violence and Migration. These incorporate a decidedly transnational, interdisciplinary and comparative approach.
Supervisors: Master's thesis committee, UNAM: Mario Humberto Ruz Sosa; Franco Savarino; María del Carmen Valverde Valdés; Marisa Margarita Pérez Domínguez; and Gerardo Lara Cisneros, Doctoral committee, and UNM: Judy Bieber; Sam Truett; Linda Hall; Kevin Gosner; Luis Herrán-Ávila