Joseph 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 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 new book, Precario: Every Histories of Eviction, Squatting, and Survival in Costa Rica, assesses those phenomena in that country from both an historical and contemporary perspective, and is scheduled for publication with McGill/Queen’s University Press.

Recent Research

• Lenti, Joseph U. “‘Only the Rivers do not Come Back’: Conservation Displacement and Rural Responses in Costa Rica.” Latin American Research Review 58:2 (Spring 2023): 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1017/lar.2023.2