Associate Professor of History
Office: Swift 26
Phone: 437-5668
Contact Leslie S. Offutt
Leslie S. Offutt earned her B.A. and M.A. degrees in history from the University of California, Riverside, and her Ph.D. degree in colonial Latin American history from the University of California, Los Angeles (1982). She has taught Latin American history at Vassar College since 1983, where in addition to being a member of the history department she serves on the steering committee of the International Studies program and is a participating member and former director of the Latin American and Latino/a Studies program. She is the author of numerous articles on Hispanic society on the North Mexican frontier in the eighteenth century and on Indian/Hispanic relations in that region. Her book Saltillo 1770–1810: Town and Region in the Mexican North was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2001. Her recent work with a collection of seventeenth and eighteenth century Nahuatl-language wills from San Esteban de Nueva Tlaxcala is part of a larger project dealing with ethnogenesis on the northern frontier of Nueva España.
Her course offerings include History 162 (Latin America: The Aftermath of Encounter), History 262 (Early Latin America to 1750), History 263 (From Colony to Nation: Latin America in the Nineteenth Century), History 264 (The Revolutionary Option? Latin America in the Twentieth Century), plus advanced seminars on the indigenous experience in Latin America and Latin American revolutions, including a course on The Cuban Revolutions. Her multidisciplinary teaching has included the introductory Latin American and Latino/A Studies (LALS) course Conceptualizing Latin and Latino/a America, the International Studies 110 course and study trip, Cuba in Transition (co-taught with colleagues in the Anthropology department, spring 2002), and INTL 110, Visions of Brazil (co-taught with colleagues in Geography and Anthropology, spring 2004).