Paul Gillingham specializes in the history of modern Mexico, and is particularly interested in grassroots approaches to state formation and the engineering of national identity. He received his D.Phil. in history from the University of Oxford in 2005 and came to UNCW after a postdoctoral stint courtesy of the Past and Present Society. He is currently working on articles on popular protest, bullfighting and electoral politics in Mexico’s dictablanda, the “soft dictatorship” of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. Dr Gillingham’s first book, Cuauhtémoc’s Bones: Forging national identity in modern Mexico, will be published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2007.

Dr Gillingham offers courses in global history, modern Mexican history, and Latin American history in the colonial and modern periods.