Historian, specialising in social and cultural history 

Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and PhD in History from Stanford University. Throughout his career, he has also served as a professor and researcher at the University of Texas and at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas in Mexico City, a task recognized in 2018 with the Humboldt Research Award. He has more than twenty published essays, in which he addresses the conflicts between history, memory and language. Among them are Speak of the City: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Chicago University Press, 2007), Maldita lengua (La Huerta Grande, 2016) or Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea (Chicago University Press, 2017). His latest publication, under the title La historia en ruinas (Alianza, 2023), addresses from a historical perspective the contemporary debates around historical monuments.