Stephen Neufeld, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor
Department of History

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Teaching interests: World history; Modern Latin American history; gender and cultural history; military and society; colonial and modern Mexico;  history of nation formation and identities.

Research interests: Gender and the history of masculinity, particularly in military contexts; social history in the nineteenth century; Mexican cultural history.

Brief biography: A native of Calgary, Canada, Stephen Neufeld took a meandering track to an academic career, including far too many summers planting trees in the Canadian north, a sojourn in southern Spain, and two years teaching English in Taiwan and Korea. After a BA in deviant sociology and military history at U of Calgary, and a MA in rainy Vancouver at UBC, his research interests have happily brought him to warmer climes, first to University of Arizona for a PhD, and now to southern California. His dissertation project entitled “Servants of the Nation: The Military in the Making of Modern Mexico, 1876-1911” examined issues of identity and culture as part of what has been called the New Military History. His continuing work focuses on the construction of subjectivities in the context of Mexican nation-formation, examining the daily lives of soldiers and officers and their role in society. Some of Dr. Neufeld’s work has appeared as chapters in Negotiating Modern Latin American Identities, Wiley-Blackwell’s A Companion to Mexican History and Culture, and Forced Marches: Militaries, Violence, and State (De)formation in Modern Mexico.