Education

Ph.D., University of California, Riverside, 2021
M.A., University of California, Riverside, 2017
B.A., California State University, Northridge, 2015

Academic and Research Interests

Dr. Malfavon is a first-generation, migrant, Jarocho, and Mexican-American scholar. Dr. Alan Malfavon received his Ph.D. in Latin American History from the University of California, Riverside in 2021. Malfavon is a historian of late-colonial and early independent Latin America. His research interests center around Afro-Mexican, Greater Caribbean, Atlantic World, Veracruz, and African Diaspora Histories. His first book, Men of the Leeward Port: Veracruz’s Afro-Descendants in the Making of Mexico, under contract with the University of Alabama Press, focuses on the understudied Afro-Mexican population of Veracruz and its hinterland of Sotavento (Leeward) and uses it to reframe the historical and historiographical transition between the colonial and national period. It argues how Afro-Mexicans facilitated, complicated, and participated in multiple socio-political processes that reshaped Veracruz and its borderlands Malfavon’s work interrogates and subverts archival silences that have sought to erase Black and Afro-Mexican agency from narratives of identity and nation-state formation and seeks to diversify these narratives by foregrounding the voices, perspectives, and actions of Afro-descendants as essential political and intellectual players in Mexico’s political and social consolidation as an independent nation.

Selected Honors and Awards

2023- Nominated for the Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán Medal for the Study of Afro-Mexican History and Culture- IVEC (Instituto Veracruzano de la Cultura)
2023- David G. Pollart Center for Arts and Humanities-  Washington State University
2022- LASA Nineteenth Century Studies Section Best Dissertation Award Honorable Mention- LASA (Latin American Studies Association)
2021- Lindon Barret Award for Black Studies – University of California, Riverside
2021- University Teaching Certificate- University of California, Riverside
2020-2021 Center for Ideas and Society, Global 19th Century Fellow- University of California, Riverside
2019-2020 Huntington Library Short-term Fellow- Huntington Library