Faculty

Edward Wright-Rios
Assistant Professor of History

PhD, University of California, San Diego 2004

Latin America; cultural history; religious change; modern Mexico; popular culture and forms of expression; graphic art; Catholicism; women and the Catholic Church; apparitionism; and ethnohistory.

Telephone: 615-322-3325
Email: edward.wright-rios@vanderbilt.edu
Office Hours: None during the summer, email for an appointment.
Office: Benson Hall 125

Edward Wright-Rios is a cultural history specializing in modern Mexico. Thus far his research has focused mostly on processes of religious reform in the Catholic Church and popular religious movements in southern Mexico. In many ways this entails an examination of how Catholic priests and activists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought about a modern revitalization of the Church as an institution and sought to discipline popular religiosity and westernize pious expression within the nation’s diverse population. Professor Wright-Rios also traces how indigenous communities, and particularly devout women, championed their own religious experiences and organized movements around allegedly miraculous experiences. Not surprisingly, this at times clashed with the goals of the clergy. His book Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Vision, Shrine and Society in Oaxaca, 1887-1934, is forthcoming, Duke University Press in 2009. He has also published in On Nineteenth-Century Costumbrismo (customs and manners essays): “Indian Saints and Nation States,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 20, no.1 (Winter 2004): 47-68. Another article of his also appears in the May 2007 issue of Past and Present, “Envisioning Mexico’s Catholic Resurgence.” Currently he is working on a new project examining the historical legacy of an apocryphal prophetess. Entitled Searching for La Madre Matiana, this book explores the “life and times” of a legendary popular prophecy narrative and the devotees and satirists that engaged it over the course of more than a century. Of particular interest to him is to track how notions of female piety have evolved in Mexican Culture. His research has been funded by the Fulbright Foundation, the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States, and Vanderbilt’s Center for the Americas and the Division for Sponsored Research.

Professor Wright-Rios teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on colonial and modern Latin America, reform and revolution, Mexico, and religious change. He has given lectures on Mexican art and politics at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts. He also led a professional development program for public school teachers in Mexico for Vanderbilt’s Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies.

Please link here to my home page.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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