Matthew Restall is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Colonial Latin American History, Anthropology and Women's Studies at Penn State University at University Park. He is also the co-director of "LiLACS" and Director of Latin American Studies, a member of the Committee for Early Modern Studies, the editor of "Ethnohistory Journal", and the series editor for "Latin American Originals". Restall's area of specialization resides in colonial Yucatan, Mexico, Maya history, the Spanish Conquest, and Africans in Spanish America. During the 1990s, his research focused on studying the Mayas of Yucatan through sources written in the Yucatec Maya language between the sixteenth and nineteenth… centuries--this work culminated in THE MAYA WORLD (1997) and MAYA CONQUISTADOR (1998). His research on the Conquest has been published as SEVEN MYTHS OF THE SPANISH CONQUEST (2003), and Invading Guatemala (2007). More recently, he received NEH and Guggenheim fellowships to study people of African descent in Mexico and Yucatan, and his book, THE BLACK MIDDLE: AFRICANS, MAYAS, AND SPANIARDS IN COLONIAL YUCATAN published in June of 2009.
Amara Solari is Assistant Professor of Art History and Anthropology at the Pennsylvania State University. She is the coauthor of 2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse. Her research focuses on processes of cultural, visual, and theological interchange between indigenous groups and Spanish settlers of New Spain, primarily focusing on the Maya of the Yucatan peninsula.