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Nathaniel Morris is a historian of modern Mexico and Central America. He's particularly interested in Indigenous politics, rural rebellions, revolutionary movements, and drug production and trafficking. Before taking up his current post as an Associate Lecturer, he was a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at UCL, where he carried out a three-year research project on the history of militias in Mexico. His current book project builds on this research by exploring the ties of history, memory, space and culture that link the armed ‘self defence’ forces active throughout the country today, to the popular paramilitary groups that helped to shape the Mexican Revolution of 1910-40. He has also written extensively about the roots of the modern Mexican drug trade, the contemporary cultural and political impacts of opium production and heroin trafficking on the Indigenous Náayari, Wixárika, O’dam and Mexicanero peoples of Mexico’s Gran Nayar region, and the participation of these same groups in the Mexican Revolution, which was the subject of his first book, Soldiers, Saints and Shamans.
Major publications
- Soldiers, Saints and Shamans: Revolutionary State-Building and Indigenous Identity in Mexico’s Gran Nayar, 1910-1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2020)
- ‘Serrano Communities and Subaltern Negotiation Strategies: the Local Politics of Opium Production in Mexico, 1940 to the Present,’ Social History of Drugs and Alcohol (May 2020), Vol.43, No.1, pp.48-81
- With R. Le Cour Grandmaison, and B. Smith, ‘The Last Harvest? From the US Fentanyl Boom to the Mexican Opium Crisis,’ Journal of Illicit Economies and Development (November 2019), Vol.1, No.3, pp.312–329
For a full list of publications, see Nathaniel’s Iris Profile.
Teaching
- Cops, Cops, Cartels and Cash Crops: The Drug Trade in the Americas, 1900 to the Present
- Culture and Revolution in Twentieth-Century Latin America
Crime and Punishment in Modern Latin America
