Matthew restall

Matthew Restall was born in London, England, in 1964. He grew up in Spain, Venezuela, and East Asia, but was schooled in England, primarily at Wellington College, before going on to receive a BA degree in Modern History from Oxford University in 1986. He earned a PhD in Latin American History from UCLA in 1992, studying under James Lockhart, and has since held teaching positions at various universities in the United States. Restall has published over twenty books and seventy essays and articles since 1995. His best-known book is Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (2003), which has also been published in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Polish.  His other books include The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550-1850 (1997), Maya Conquistador (1998), Invading Guatemala (with Florine Asselbergs, 2007), 2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse (with Amara Solari, 2011), Latin America in Colonial Times (with Kris Lane, 2011), and The Conquistadors (with Felipe

Fernández-Armesto, 2012). His book The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan won the Conference on Latin American History’s 2009 prize for best book on Mexican history.  His newest book, When Montezuma Met Cortés, was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in January 2018.  He has since written a book on Maya history (with Mark Christensen) titled Return to Ixil,  published in 2019.  He also since completed a book (with Amara Solari) for Oxford's Very Short Introductions series titled The Maya, as well as a book for the 33 1/3 series on the album Blue Moves (see the separate section below on Music); both come out in May 2020.  He is currently writing a book on early Belize, tentatively titled The Caye.

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He is a member of the New Philology school of colonial Mexican history, and a founder of a related school, the New Conquest History. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the John Carter Brown Library, the Library of Congress, and the Capitol Historical Society. He is currently Immediate Past President of the American Society for Ethnohistory.

Restall's sister is Emma Restall Orr, the neo-Druid author. His father is the ornithologist and bird artist, Robin Restall. He is married to the art historian, Amara Solari.