Alan Knight

Alan Sydney Knight (born 6 November 1946) is a professor and researcher of Latin American history and former professor at the University of Oxford in England. His work has been recognised with several awards, including the Order of the Aztec Eagle from the Mexican government.

Biography Knight did his undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral work all at Oxford University, describing his college experience as lacking women and being in a fortress-like environment, regularly conversing in Latin. He began specialising in Latin American history because of the Cuban Revolution of Fidel Castro, which concerned the British government enough to sponsor several new Latin American centres including one at Oxford. He has been the director of the Latin American Centre and/or the director of Graduate Studies several times at Oxford and is a fellow of St Antony's College at the same institution.

Most of his teaching and research work relates to modern Mexican history, but he also teaches the history of other Latin American countries. His research work stresses the role of the agrarian society, state building, revolutionary upheavals, populism and democracy. In 2009, Knight received the Order of the Aztec Eagle for his research work from the Mexican government. In 2012, he received an honorary doctorate from the Universidad Veracruzana in Mexico.

Major publications

Books Revolución, Democracia y Populismo en América Latina (Santiago. 2005) (Wilson) (ed.) Caciquismo in Twentieth-century Mexico. (London, 2005) 3-48pp. Mexico: from the Beginning to the Spanish Conquest (Cambridge, 2002) Mexico: The Colonial Era (Cambridge, 2002) (with J.C. Brown), The Mexican Petroleum Industry in the Twentieth Century. (Austin, 1992) The Mexican Revolution, v. 1. Porfirians, Liberals and Peasants and v. 2, Counter-revolution and Reconstruction. (Cambridge, 1986) US-Mexican Relations, 1910–1940: An Interpretation. (San Diego, 1987) Chapter on Mexico, 1930–1946, in The Cambridge History of Latin America (Vol. VII, 1990)

Others Caciquismo in Twentieth-century Mexico (Institute for the Study of the Americas: London, 2005), 3–48 Mexico Since Independence (Cambridge, 2004) The Domestic Dynamics of the Mexican and Bolivian Revolutions, in Proclaiming Revolution: The Bolivian Revolution in Comparative Perspective (London, 2003), 54–90 Mexico: The Colonial Era (Cambridge, 2002), xix + 353 Subalterns, Signifiers and Statistics: Perspectives on Mexican Historiography. Latin American Research Review 37 no.2 (2002), 136–58 Tres crisis de fin de siglo en M, in Crisis, reform y revolución (Mexico City, 2002), 87–128 The Weight of the State in Modern Mexico, in Studies in the Formation of the Nation State in Latin America (London, 2002), 212–253 Democratic and Revolutionary Traditions in Latin America. Bulletin of Latin American Research 20(2) (2001), 147–86 Britain and Latin America, 1800–1914, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume 3, The nineteenth century (Oxford, 1999), 122–145 Latin America, in The Oxford History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1998), 277–291 Populism and Neo-Populism in Latin America, especially Mexico. Journal of Latin American Studies 30 (1998), 223–248 Habitus and Homicide: Political Culture in Revolutionary Mexico, in Citizens of the Pyramid: Essays on Mexican Political Culture (1997), 107–130