Edward Wright-Rios

Interim Chair of History Department
Professor of History and Mellon Foundation Chair in the Humanities

Edward Wright-Ríos (Professor of History and Mellon Foundation Chair in the Humanities) is a cultural historian specializing in modern Mexico. His most recent book on pilgrimage – Devotion in Motion: Pilgrimage in Modern Mexico – was published by the University of Chicago Press in June of 2025. The project is simultaneously a historical, visual, ethnographic, and digital analysis of a cultural phenomenon that has proven extraordinarily resilient over four centuries. In particular, Wright-Ríos focuses closely on the last 60 to 70 years as technological changes, social media, and infrastructure improvements fueled the dramatic expansion of pilgrimage in southern Mexico. Crucially Wright-Ríos participated in a six-day walking pilgrimage alongside thousands of devotees and Mike Dubose, a Nashville-based professional photographer in 2016. Two years later, in 2018, he accompanied a large cycling group comprised of 265 riders and perhaps a dozen support vehicles that has organized a pilgrimage every year since 1979. The book also analyzes the complex ways devotees use social media to organize journeys and build virtual devotional communities. In sum, Devotion in Motion provides an unparalleled, intimate discussion of lived religion and the dynamism of pilgrimage. 

The research for Devotion in Motion won Professor Wright-Ríos a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018.

His first book Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887-1934, (Duke University Press, 2009) won the 2010 Murdo J. MacLeod Prize of the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association. It was also named the winner of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), Mexico Section, Social Science Book Prize, for outstanding scholarship on Mexico. Revolutions examines religious reformism in the Catholic Church and popular religious movements in southern Mexico. Thus, it tracks both “top-down” and “bottom-up” processes. On one hand, it explores how Catholic priests and activists brought about a modern revitalization of the Church as an institution and sought to discipline popular religiosity and westernize pious expression within the nation’s diverse population. On the other, it traces how indigenous communities, and particularly devout women, championed their own religious experiences and organized movements around events and experiences that they deemed miraculous.

Professor Wright-Rios’s second book scrutinizes the historical legacy of an apocryphal prophetess and her visions concerning Mexico’s tumultuous history. Entitled Searching for La Madre Matiana: Prophecy and Popular Culture in Modern Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, 2014), this book offers a “life and times” of a legendary popular figure and narrative. The book follows the devotees, satirists, activists, and reformers who made use of prophetess and her visions—and repeatedly hence altered their meaning—over the course of a century. At its core, the book explores how Mexicans tended to conflate female piety, fanaticism, and cultural authenticity amid the advent of modernity. As a result, they kept coming back to the legendary Matiana figure as they debated how Mexican society and culture should or shouldn’t change, or alternatively, how she demonstrated that Mexico had modernized, but done so in a disjointed, inappropriate manner.

Professor Wright-Rios has enjoyed the support of the Fulbright Foundation, the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States, and Vanderbilt’s Center for the Americas and the Division for Sponsored Research. He was also awarded the Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship administered by the American Council of Learned Societies in 2011. And most recently, he won a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018.

Professor Wright-Rios teaches courses on colonial and modern Latin America, reform and revolution, Mexico, Latinos in the US South, the social and cultural impact of the drug trade, and religion and politics. He has given lectures on Mexican art, dance, and politics at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts. He has been an active member of CLACX for over 20 years.