Biography

Lean Sweeney received her doctorate in Latin American History from the University of New Mexico in 2019. Her work focuses on the impact of theories of space, frontiers and borderlands on the creation of nations, citizens, race and criminality. The Spanish language version of her Master's thesis, Survival of the Bandits: the Maya Icaiché and Frontier Politics in the Yucatan Peninsula, 1847-1904, was published by 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. Her third project, Rights without Rites: Concubines in the Post-Colony, examines concubinage as a tool of economic and political negotiation in nineteenth-century Guatemala.  Sweeney has also published on Maximilian of Habsburg's execution in nineteenth-century Mexico ("Over His Dead Body: Mexico-U.S. Diplomacy and the Execution of Maximilian of Habsburg in Mexico, June 19, 1867") 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.