Butler, Matthew M.

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Butler, Matthew M.

PERSONAL:

Education: University of Bristol, Ph.D., 2000.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, Queen's University Belfast, University Rd., Belfast BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University lecturer and writer. Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, lecturer in Latin American studies, 2003—. University of Cambridge, junior research fellow, 1999-2002.

AWARDS, HONORS:

British Academy postdoctoral award; Arts and Humanities Research Council Award, 2006.

WRITINGS:

Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico's Cristero Rebellion: Michoacán, 1927-29, British Academy/ Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 2004.

(Editor) Faith and Impiety in Revolutionary Mexico, Palgrave Macmillan (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to books, including Caciques and Caudillos in Twentieth-Century Mexico, edited by Alan Knight and Wil Pansters, Institute of Study for the Americas (London, England), 2005. Contributor to academic journals, including Journal of Latin American Studies, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Americas, and Historia Mexicana.

SIDELIGHTS:

Matthew M. Butler is a scholar of and lecturer in Latin American studies at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He also coordinates their level 1A Spanish language teaching. His research focuses on the history of revolutionary Mexico, particularly the Mexican Revolution's religious history and the Cristero revolt. Prior to joining Queen's University, he was a junior research fellow in the faculty of history at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, where he held a British Academy post-doctoral award. From 1995 to 1999 he was a doctoral student at the University of Bristol, and he received his Ph.D. in 2000. In 2006, he received an Arts and Humanities Research Council Award for research on the schisms in the Catholic Church in Mexico between 1925 and 1940. His 2004 book Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico's Cristero Rebellion: Michoacán, 1927-29 has been well received by critics for its analysis of the people in the Mexican state of Michoacán during the years leading up to and following the Mexican Revolution. He followed this work with Faith and Impiety in Revolutionary Mexico, a compilation of scholarly articles which he prepared and edited.

Butler's Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico's Cristero Rebellion is a scholarly work on a Catholic uprising against the anti-Catholic Mexican government of the 1920s. In the years he studied, the government had recently passed laws targeting the Catholic Church, such as outlawing monastic orders, denying the vote to priests, and requiring that schools be secular. These oppressive laws were set forth in the Mexican Constitution of 1917, created near the end of the Mexican Revolution. The Cristero Rebellion was a Catholic uprising against those laws. Butler traces its history within the eastern Michoacán region of Mexico to determine why some peasants joined the Cristero Rebellion (whose battle cry was "Viva Cristo Rey," or "Long Live Christ the King") and some did not. Michael M. Brescia, writing for History: Review of New Books, noted that Butler "neatly constructs a theoretical framework that explains the capacity of religious culture to shape and reshape the multilayered identities of the region's peasantry." Kristina A. Boylan, writing for the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, found that the work is "researched thoroughly and written engagingly" and that it "moves beyond the dichotomies that have rendered earlier studies of religion in Mexico oversimplistic." Butler looks at the socioeconomic forces that drove the peasants to join the uprising, as well as the extent of their Catholic loyalty, thus combining material and religious history. Ben Fallaw, in a review for the Historian, characterized Butler's work as "a nimble narrative unencumbered by jargon and enlivened by a few marvelous photographs" and deemed it "the best (if regionally specific) social history we have of the Mexican Catholic Church to date."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, June, 2005, Christopher R. Boyer, review of Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico's Cristero Rebellion: Michoacán, 1927-29, p. 837.

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, April, 2005, Kirkwood J.B., review of Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico's Cristero Rebellion, p. 1454.

English Historical Review, June, 2005, Adrian A. Bantjes, review of Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico's Cristero Rebellion, p. 861.

Historian, summer, 2006, Ben Fallaw, review of Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico's Cristero Rebellion.

History: Review of New Books, fall, 2005, Michael M. Brescia, review of Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico's Cristero Rebellion.

International Review of Social History, December, 2006, review of Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico's Cristero Rebellion, p. 516.

Journal of Ecclesiastical History, October, 2006, Kristina A. Boylan, review of Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico's Cristero Rebellion, p. 797.