Danna Levin is full-time profesor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana - Azcapotzalco, México.
She is a historian and social anthropologist, holding a BA degree from the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM, and a PhD from London School of Economics and Political Science. Between 2011 and 2014 she chaired the Postgraduate Program on Historiography at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. Her main interests are Hispanic American colonial historiography, transculturation in colonial New Spain, and interethnic relations in the United States Southwest with particular emphasis on contemporary New Mexico. Dr. Levin is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores de México and since 2013 also a member of the Editorial Board of the academic review Anales del Instituto de Investigciones Estéticas (UNAM, México) Her book Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniards, and the Invention of Nuevo México is published by Oklahoma University Press (2014).
Other recent publications include co-edited books where she also contributed chapters: Danna Levin & Federico Navarrete, Indios, mestizos y españoles. Interculturalidad e historiografía en la Nueva España (México, UAM-Azcapotzalco / IIH-UNAM, 2007), Martha Ortega, Danna Levin & Ma. Estela Báez Villaseñor, Los grupos nativos del septentrión novohispano ante la independencia de México, 1810-1847 (México, UAM-Iztapalapa / UABC, 2010), and Carlo Bonfiglioli, Arturo Gutiérrez, Marie Areti Hers & Danna Levin, Las Vías del Noroeste III: Genealogías, transversalidades y convergencias (México, IIA-UNAM, 2011). Among the chapters she recently contributed to books edited by other scholars are: “Vecindad interétnica e identidad cultural: la fiesta de San Lorenzo en las comunidades indo-hispanas de Picurís y Peñasco, Nuevo México,” in Las Vías del Noroeste II. Propuesta para una perspectiva sistémica e interdisciplinaria, coordinated by Carlo Bonfiglioli and others (México, IIA-UNAM, 2008), and “La historia inscrita en una danza: los matachines, mapa del cosmos y la memoria,” in Mapas del cielo y la tierra. Espacio y territorio en la palabra oral, coodirnated by Mariana Masera (México, UNAM, 2014).
Research Interests and professional commitments:
Professor Radding’s research interests in Latin American colonial history focus on the intersections between environmental and ethnographic history. Her current work exemplifies methods for comparative history, across North and South America and within the broad borderlands region of northern Mexico and southwestern U.S. Her scholarship is rooted in the imperial borderlands of the Spanish and Portuguese American empires, emphasizing the role of indigenous peoples and other colonized groups in shaping those borderlands, transforming their landscapes, and producing colonial societies. Her current project, “Bountiful Deserts, Imperial Shadows,” explores the ecological transition between wild and cultivated plants, the cultural intersections of sedentary and nomadic peoples, and the production of knowledge in northern Mexico. Radding is co-editor with Chad Bryant (UNC-Chapel Hill) and Paul Readman (Kings College, London) of Borderlands in World History (Palgrave, 2014). She is Past President of the Conference on Latin American History (2011-2013) of the American Historical Association; currently she is book review editor of HAHR and, in the past, has served on the Editorial Boards of HAHR and The Americas and on the Advisory Council of the Inter-American Foundation. Her
selected recent publications include: Landscapes of Power and Identity. Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. (Published in Spanish in Bolivia, 2005, and in Mexico, 2008); “The Children of Mayahuel: Agaves, Human Cultures, and Desert Landscapes in Northern Mexico,” Environmental History 17 (January 2012): 84-115; “Conclusion: Of the ‘Lands in Between’ and the Environments of Modernity,” in Christopher Boyer, ed., A Land Between Waters: Environmental Histories of Modern Mexico, Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 2012, p. 277-296.
