Biography

Mark W. Lentz, associate professor of Latin American history at Utah Valley University, is a historian of colonial Mexico, Central America, and the Atlantic World. His current interests include interpreters in the conquest and colonization of Yucatan and interethnic relations in colonial and early national Mexico and Guatemala. He recently published articles on indigenous-African relations in eighteenth-century Guatemala and Belize and the role of Jesuits in translation, conversion, and pedagogy in colonial Yucatan, and an article on creole and African-descent fluency and literacy in indigenous languages in the Hispanic American Historical Review that won the 2018 Best Article Prize at RMCLAS. His first monograph, Murder in Merida, 1792: Violence, Factions, and the Law, was published in June 2018 with the University of New Mexico Press's Dialogos Series. He was the 2015-2016 R. David Parsons Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island. He received his Ph.D. from Tulane University in 2009. has previously directed or co-directed two travel study programs for UVU students, including many history education majors. These two programs included a Short-Term Multicultural Experience (STME) in Spain along the Camino de Santiago during the summer of 2015 and a 2016 Fall Break Domestic Multicultural Experience (DME) along the path blazed by fray Silvestre Velez de Escalante and Atanasio Dominguez. When he is off campus, he enjoys hiking, rock climbing, and skiing in the Wasatch Range.

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