I am a Nicaraguan-born sociologist and historian whose work deals with questions of violence, gender, religion and the state in modern and contemporary Latin America. I am Lecturer in Sociology and Deputy Director of Collective Social Futures/ISS21 at the University College Cork (UCC. I am also an Associate Research Professor of Latin American History at the George Washington University (GW). In the 2021-2022 academic year, I was a Marie Curie Junior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (FRIAS) at University of Freiburg. Prior to joining UCC and GW, I was an Assistant Professor at Loyola University Chicago and at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). In 2017-2018, I was a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. I hold a PhD in Sociology and Historical Studies from the New School for Social Research. My book In the Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (University of California Press, 2020) examines the uncharted history of lynching during the formative decades of the post-revolutionary period (1930-1960). I am co-editor of the books Violence and Crime in Latin America: Representations and Politics (2017), Human Security and Chronic Violence in Mexico (2019) and Cristianismo, derechas y conservadurismo en las Américas (2026).