Eva M. Mehl
Director of Honors College
Education
Ph.D. in Latin American History, University of California, Davis
Ph.D. in European History, University of Alicante, Alicante, Spain
M.A. in Latin American History, Universidad Internacional de Andalucía, Huelva, Spain
B.A. in History, University of Alicante, Alicante, Spain
Specialization in Teaching
My teaching spans the history of Latin America, the Spanish Empire, and the early modern global world, with a consistent emphasis on connecting regional and local histories to broader transoceanic and comparative frameworks. At the undergraduate level I teach courses on colonial and modern Latin America, the rise and fall of the Spanish Empire, Mexican history, the history of US-Latin American relations, and the history of drugs and drug trafficking in Latin America, among others. In the Honors College I have taught seminars on oceans and empire in global history and on the multicultural foundations of early modern Spain. My honors teaching often includes study abroad components, such a short program in Seville and Granada, Spain, and a course taught entirely in London examining the history of global empire through the lens of a single city. I have also taught graduate seminars on the Spanish Empire, early modern global commodities, and science, culture, and power in colonial Spanish America.
Research Interests
My research sits at the intersection of Spanish imperial history, Atlantic and Pacific world studies, and the social history of empire. My primary scholarly focus is the Spanish Empire in its global dimensions — specifically the connections, flows, and tensions that linked colonial Mexico and the Philippines during the period of Bourbon imperial reform in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. My Cambridge University Press monograph, Forced Migration in the Spanish Pacific World (2016), examines the transportation of Mexican recruits, vagrants, and convicts to the Philippines as a lens through which to understand Bourbon social policy, imperial governance, and the lived experience of marginalized people in the peripheries of the Spanish world. A second major research strand traces the history of the Society of Jesus in colonial Mexico and the Spanish Empire — the controversies surrounding Jesuit missionary strategies, the politics of the Jesuit expulsion of 1767, and the subsequent exile of the Mexican Jesuit province. My more recent work has extended my Pacific world framework to examine Spanish Augustinian missionaries in China in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, exploring the religious, cultural, and imperial dimensions of Spanish engagement beyond the Americas. My research has been published in the Hispanic American Historical Review, The Americas, and other venues, and has been supported by fellowships from Yale University, the University of California, and the Spanish Ministry of Education.