I am a historian of colonial Latin America, especially the impact of Spanish rule on indigenous peoples in southern Mexico and Guatemala. This makes me an early modernist and fuels my interest in comparative world history, global political economy, and social theory-all areas of historical inquiry that are integral to my teaching. After 10 years as a department head, I've come back to full-time teaching with a renewed comitment to promoting the values, goals, and sensibilities of the liberal arts. For me, this means exposure to a wide variety of academic disciplines, including the humanities and fine arts, that offer different and sometimes competing ways of understanding the human experience.