Scott Doebler

Doebler is a historian of colonial Latin America, ethnohistory and the environment. His research examines Maya societies and tropical forests in lowland Yucatán and Guatemala and their connections to the Caribbean during the 16th and 17th centuries. Unlike other areas of the Americas, there was no Spanish “colonial” period in the Southern Maya Lowlands. Rather, this region remained an autonomous Maya space for the entirety of the early modern period. Maya societies and the tropical forest ecosystems co-constructed communities that offered a range of possibilities for engaging with the early modern world on their own terms. His dissertation, “Arboreal Apogees: Maya, Spanish, and English Ecologies in Lowland Yucatán and Guatemala, 1517-1717,” won the 2023 Rachel Carson Prize from the American Society of Environmental History for the best dissertation in environmental history.

“The Chinese Cotton Contest: The Royal Economic Society of Guatemala, Maya Farmers, and the Struggle Over Enlightenment-Era Agricultural Science, 1796-1798.” Colonial Latin American Review. 2021

(With Matthew Restall) “Conquest of Mexico and Peru.” Oxford Bibliographies Online. 2020.