Faculty Committee
Mexico Center Chair
Professor of History Matthew Butler, LLILAS Mexico Center Chair
Matthew Butler
A longtime faculty affiliate of LLILAS, Matthew Butler is professor of modern Mexican history in the UT Austin Department of History, where he specializes in the history of Catholicism in Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, as well as rural and Indigenous history.
He is editor of the Mexican Studies / Estudios Mexicanos (MS/EM), a bilingual scholarly and interdisciplinary journal published by the University of California and supported by the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS).
Butler is author of Mexico’s Spiritual Reconquest: Indigenous Catholics and Father Pérez’s Revolutionary Church, and co-editor of Tras las tierras comunales indígenas. Los libros de Hijuelas y el liberalismo decimonónico en Michoacán and México y el primer concilio Vaticano. Butler is also director of the Hijuelas Project, a digitization and research archive on the history of Indigenous communities in nineteenth-century Michoacán, Mexico.
Committee Members
Ricardo Ainslie
Professor, M.K. Hage Centennial Professor in Education, Counseling Psychology, College of Education
Interests: Intersection of psychology and culture; population health; immigration, ethnic conflicts, collective identity
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Richard Albert
William Stamps Farish Professor in Law, Professor of Government, and Director of Constitutional Studies
Interests: Constitution-making; constitutional amendment and dismemberment; comparative constitutionalism
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Jacqueline Avila
Associate Professor of Musicology, Butler School of Music
Interests: Film music studies; sound studies; intersections of identity, tradition, and modernity in the musical cultures and new media of Mexico, Latin America, and the Latinx community in the U.S.
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Denise Gilman
Director, Immigration Clinic, UT School of Law
Interests: Immigration law, human rights, refugee law and policy
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Edgar Gómez-Cruz
Assistant Dean for Community and Global Initiatives and Associate Professor, School of Information
Interests: Digital ethnograpy; visual culture; critical studies on data and algorithms; Latin America
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Mexicanist Faculty
With over 70 Mexicanist faculty on campus, UT Austin has one of the largest research and teaching groups on Mexico and border issues outside Mexico. Their research covers a range of interests, from Mesoamerica's culture and languages to colonial and modern history, water resources, social inequalities, migration and border issues, gender and indigenous issues, contemporary Mexican politics, and art and architecture.
Visit the LLILAS Faculty page and filter your search by area to learn about LLILAS faculty working on Mexican, border, and Latino issues.