Eric Van Young, Ph.D.

A historian of colonial Mexico by training, Eric Van Young has written on rural economic history (especially the history of haciendas) and regions in Mexico. In the mid-1980s his interest turned to the history of popular groups in the Mexicau independence struggle (1810 - 1821), on which he published a book in 2001. His major current research project is a biography of Lucas Alamán (1792 - 1853), one of the great statesmen and public intellectuals of 19th-century Mexico and Latin America, arguably Mexico's greatest 19th-century historian and the architect of Mexican conservatism, as well as one of the great early promoters of the country's modernization and industrialization. Research on Alamán continues in Mexicau archives (Condumex, the Archivo General de la Nación) and is projected for other archives in Mexico and such repositories as the Arquivio di Stato in Naples. Other projects he is pursuing include the history of Mexican psychiatry, the Monty Montezuma controversy at San Diego State Univeristy, and the cultural history of advertising in Mexico from the early nineteenth century to about World War II.