Liza Bakewell is an assistant professor (research) at CLACS. She directs The Mesolore Project (TMP), conducts research on language and art and writes poetry and creative non-fiction. TMP focuses on diverse topics concerning Mesoamerican history, including pictorial manuscripts from the pre- and post-European contact period, indigenous rights, cultural property and gender. Phase I resulted in Mesolore: Exploring Mesoamerican Cultures, a CD ROM-Internet hybrid, launched in 2001. Phase II (2008-2011), Mesolore: A Cyber Center for Scholars, Teachers and Students of Mesoamerica, will be launched spring 2009 at mesolore.net. In addition to expanding Mesolore’s primary documents, Phase II includes the participation of scholars from the Americas and Europe and an international, educational exchange with graduates and undergraduates in Mexico, the U.S. and Europe. Funding for TMP has come from the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Davis Education Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

Bakewell is the author and editor of several publications, including Madre, Travels with a Spanish Noun (forthcoming 2009); Looking High and Low: Art and Cultural Identity (co-editor, U. Arizona Press, 1995); Object Image Inquiry: The Art Historian at Work (co-author, Getty, 1988); "Image Acts" (American Anthropologist, 1998); articles on Frida Kahlo in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies (1993), Pasión por Frida (1992), and the Encyclopedia of Mexico (1998). In addition, she has received numerous grants and fellowships for her research and publications, including two Fulbright Fellowships for research and writing on Mexico. Bakewell received her MA and PhD in anthropology from Brown University and her BA in liberal arts from Sarah Lawrence College.

In Spring 2010 she will be NEH Distinguished Chair of Women's Studies, Colgate University. During her semester at Colgate she will teach, "Women Speak: Introduction to Engendered Linguistic Anthropology and "Material Culture, Material Matters: The Ethnography of Things in Everyday Life.”


Dr. Bakewell's CV