Lean Sweeney

Lean Sweeney is an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia, specializing in transnational history, Indigenous Latin America, citizenship and migration, frontiers and borderlands, and the 19th-century history of Mexico and Central America. She earned a BA from the University of California (1994), an MA from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2004), and a PhD in Latin American History from the University of New Mexico (2019).

• Education
  • B.A., University of California (1994)
  • M.A., Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2004)
  • Ph.D., University of New Mexico (2019)

Her research examines theories of space, frontiers, and borderlands in shaping nations, citizenship, race, and criminality. Publications include a book on Maya Icaiché frontier politics (2006), a forthcoming monograph on transnational migration in Mexico-Guatemala (UNC Press), and a current project analyzing concubinage in 19th-century Guatemala.

Recent scholarly work spans human rights crises in El Salvador (2024), gender-based violence during the pandemic (2021), and U.S.-Mexico diplomacy around Maximilian of Habsburg's execution (2019). She also contributed to interdisciplinary research on Indigenous identity and political legitimacy (2009).

Dr. Sweeney teaches undergraduate courses in Modern Latin America, Human Rights in Latin America, and Gender, Violence, and Migration, employing transnational, interdisciplinary, and comparative frameworks.