Bradley Skopyk
Associate Professor
Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program
Biography
Bradley Skopyk is an associate professor of history at 91ÉçÇø and an affiliate of the Environmental Studies program and the GIS and Remote Sensing Core Facility. His research examines environmental and climate history in colonial Mexico, with particular attention to water, landscape change, Indigenous communities, and environmental memory.
He is the author of Colonial Cataclysms: Climate, Landscape, and Memory in Mexico's Little Ice Age (University of Arizona Press, 2020). His current work on church-led water projects and Indigenous authority contributes to his second book project, Mischievous Nature: Making Sense of and Living with Environmental Change in Colonial Mexico, 1521–1660. He also directs The Ecology of Crisis, an open-source database documenting ecology and human health in premodern Mexico.
Publications
- Mischievous Nature: Making Sense of and Living with Environmental Change in Colonial Mexico, 1521–1660 (book project in development). Current San Juan Teotihuacán research for the book includes two papers in preparation: "Channeling Sacred Water: Indigenous Authority, Franciscan Building, and Sacred-Hydraulic Landscapes at San Juan Teotihuacán, 1557–1590" and "Rank-Ordered Vignettes, Chronological Cartography: Reading the 1557–1559 Revolt in the Códice de San Juan Teotihuacán."
- "Climate and New World Virgin Soil Epidemics: A Spatio-Temporal Approach to Understanding the Intersection of Mass Mortality, Spanish Imperialism, and the Little Ice Age in Early-Colonial Mexico." In Changing Climates, Changing Cultures, forthcoming 2026.
- The Ecology of Crisis: Locating Health and Ecology in Colonial Mexico (ecocrisis.net), 2026. Designer and developer of an open-source, geolocated database; as of October 2026, it contained 3,796 events across 635 locations and 299 years.
- "La reinversión de la riqueza del rÃo: Una historia del uso del agua en el San Juan Teotihuacán colonial a través de caminatas, teledetección ambiental y mapas históricos." 2023.
- Colonial Cataclysms: Climate, Landscape, and Memory in Mexico's Little Ice Age. University of Arizona Press, 2020.
Education
- PhD in History, York University, 2010
Research Interests
- Environmental and climate history of colonial Mexico and Latin America
- Water history, hydrology, and hydraulic infrastructure
- Indigenous communities, colonial authority, and church-led building
- Environmental memory, landscape change, and socioecological crises
- Digital and spatial history, historical databases, and GIS
Teaching Interests
- Latin American and Mexican history, including Mexico: Spanish Conquest and Mexico: Aztecs to Present
- Latin American environmental history and climate history
- World environmental history and climate catastrophes, including World Climate Catastrophes
- Digital history, GIS, and spatial humanities, including Digital History and History & GIS
Honors and Awards
- Data Sciences TAE Seed Grant, May 2026, for "Developing Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for Under-Resourced Historical Languages: Ottoman Turkish as Case Study"
- Data Science TAE Award for a Digital Humanities Laboratory thematic program, 2024
- Data Science TAE award for "A Crowdsourcing Application for Historical Health Crises in Pre-Modern Mexico," 2022–2023
- Rachel Carson Prize for Best Dissertation in Environmental History, American Society for Environmental History, 2012
- Outstanding Dissertation Prize, Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 2012