Ph.D. Princeton University, History, 1994

J.D. Univ. of Michigan Law School, 1984

B.A. Oberlin College, Economics, 1981

Latin America; Modern Brazil; Colonial Mexico; Legal History; early-modern Spanish empire in the New World

Books

Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, 2008).

Intimate Ironies: Making Middle-Class Lives in Modern Brazil (Stanford, 1999).

Select Articles

“Pacto entre rey lejano y súbditos indígenas—Justicia, legalidad y política en México, siglo XVII,” Historia Mexicana (forthcoming spring 2011).

“Forward” to Negotiation Within Domination: New Spain's Indian Pueblos Confront the Spanish State, Ethelia Ruiz Medrano and Susan Kellogg, eds. (forthcoming University of Colorado Press, 2010). 

 "In the Middle of the Margin," in "We Shall Be All": Toward a Global History of the Middle Class, Mary Kay Vaugh, Barbara Weinstein, Ricardo Lopez, eds. (forthcoming)

“‘There is nothing self interest cannot command’: A Romance of Early-Modern Mexico City,” in Erin O’Conncer and Leo Garofolo, eds. Documenting Latin America: Race, Class and Gender.  Prentice Hall: New York, 2010.

"Slave Litigants and the Processes of Liberty in Seventeenth-Century New Spain," in "Slavery, Citizenship, and the State in Classicial Antiquity and the Modern Americas," Special Issue of The European Review of History/Revue Europeene d'Histoire, spring 2009.

"How Juan and Leonor Won Their Freedom: Litigation and Liberty in Seventeenth-Century Mexico," Hispanic American Historical Review 85:1 (Feb. 2005): 39-79.

"Toward a History of Brazil's 'Cordial Racism'--Race Beyond Liberalism," Comparative Studies in Society and History 47 (2005): 318-47.

"Domesticating Modernity: Markets, Home, and Morality in the Middle Class in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, 1930sa nd 1940s," Journal of Urban History 24:3 (Mar. 1998): 337-63.