Joseph U. Lenti, PhD

About

I am an historian of Latin America and university professor with vast teaching and advising, event-organizing, and research and publishing experience. In Mexico, New Mexico, and now Washington state I have taught survey-, upper-division-, and graduate-level courses (in person and, increasingly so, online) in the modern and colonial history of the region, in addition to world history, European history, and research methods courses. I served from 2015-2022 as the advisor for EWU’s history M.A. program and helped convert it to a fully online program that now enrolls hundreds of students. During my career I have conceived of and organized major conferences on topics ranging from pressing issues in Mexican-U.S. relations, Inclusion/Exclusion and the Vote in U.S Electoral Politics, and throughlines of urban informality and squatting in Latin American and North American settings.

Alongside the above-mentioned activities I have consistently researched abroad, published, and given papers at academic conferences and public forums. Most significantly has been the publication of Redeeming the Revolution: The State and Organized Labor in Post-Tlatelolco Mexico (University of Nebraska Press, 2017.) The book received positive scholarly reviews and was named a book of distinction by Mexico’s national university, UNAM. My current research assesses the phenomena of land dispossession, land invasion, and squatting in Mexico and Costa Rica comparatively, and from both an historical and contemporary perspective.