Matthew Butler

Matthew Butler is a Professor at the University of Texas at Austin's College of Liberal Arts with a PhD from the University of Bristol. His academic work centers on Mexican history, Catholicism, and rural societies, with active teaching responsibilities including courses on the Mexican Revolution and Church-State relations in Latin America.

His research spans modern Mexican history, Catholic dissent, indigenous communities, and bullfighting culture. Current projects include a monograph on liberal Catholics in Mexico (Liberty in the Church: Catholic Dissent in Modern Mexico), a study of Graham Greene's travels in 1930s Mexico, and research on the Mexican bullfight. He directs the Hijuelas Project, digitizing 19th-century indigenous land records from Michoacán, resulting in the open-access publication Tras las tierras comunales indígenas.

Butler serves as editor of the journal Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos and has published extensively through major academic presses. His recent books include Mexico’s Spiritual Reconquest: Indigenous Catholics and Father Pérez’s Revolutionary Church (University of New Mexico Press, 2023) and edited volumes on Vatican Council I and Mexican agrarian history. He regularly teaches graduate and undergraduate courses cross-listed between Latin American Studies (LAS) and History (HIS), focusing on 19th-20th century Mexico, Catholicism, and revolutionary movements.

His laboratory of scholarly activity centers on the Hijuelas Project, which provides digital access to indigenous communal land records through the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme (EAP931). This initiative bridges archival preservation with historical analysis of indigenous land tenure systems under Mexican liberalism.