Lori Boornazian Diel’s teaching focuses on the art of ancient and colonial Latin America, while her research considers how visual works created by Aztec artists in the years after the Spanish invasion and imposition of Hispano-Christian rule could be used as tools of persuasion, reconciliation, and identity formation under a colonial system.
Her current research project focuses on Aztec manuscripts that depict Native peoples being mistreated by Spaniards and explores the ways in which their brutalized bodies are shown. She is interested in how these images could be effective on an aesthetic level. She considers these images as a new tradition in Aztec pictography, one rooted in a changing conceptualization of the body from a more abstracted representation of the body rooted in Nahua tradition to a more mimetic one tied to European tradition and aesthetics.
Her second book, The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late Sixteenth-Century New Spain (2018), centered on a sixteenth-century Aztec manuscript that was created just after a devastating epidemic. In response, a Nahua community put together a book with seemingly disparate contents, including sections on European medical astrology, Christian and Aztec calendars, a royal Aztec genealogy, and an extensive annals history of pre- and post-conquest Mexico City. Diel made sense of the manuscript’s varied contents by considering them holistically. For the manuscript’s owners and creators, the Codex Mexicanus was a guide for living in late sixteenth-century New Spain and a means of asserting their identity as Nahua Christians. This book received the Roland H. Bainton Prize in Art and Music History by the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference.
Her first book (2008) focused on the Tira de Tepechpan, which was created by multiple artists for the relatively minor Aztec city of Tepechpan. The pictorial history sets Tepechpan’s past against that of the capital of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan. Diel’s book explained the contents of the Tira de Tepechpan and showed how its painters manipulated Tepechpan’s history to argue for a privileged position for the city under Spanish colonial rule. Her most recent book, Aztec Codices: What They Tell Us about Daily Life (2020), uses images from Aztec codices to explain different facets of life in Aztec society. Diel has also published essays that consider specific Aztec pictorial manuscripts as well as the role of women in Aztec history. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
BOOKS
Aztec Codices: What They Tell Us about Daily Life. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2020.
The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late Sixteenth-Century New Spain. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018.
The Tira de Tepechpan: Negotiating Place under Aztec and Spanish Rule. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008.
SELECTED ARTICLES & ESSAYS
“Beyond Malinche: Other Women in the Conquista.” In Beyond Cortés and Montezuma: The Conquest of Mexico Revisited, edited by Vitus Huber and John Schwaller, 243-271. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2024.
“From Orderly Past to Chaotic Present: The Transition to Spanish Rule in Aztec Pictorial Histories.” In Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican Traditions for Constructing Power and Place, edited by Merideth Paxton and Leticia Staines Cicero, 77-94. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017.
“The Codex Mexicanus: Time, Religion, History, and Health in Sixteenth-Century New Spain.” The Americas vol. 73, no. 4 (2016):427-458.
“The Codex Mexicanus Genealogy: Binding the Mexica Past and the Colonial Present.” Colonial Latin American Review vol. 24, no. 2 (2015):120-146.
“The Mapa Quinatzin and Texcoco’s Ideal Subordinate Lords.” In Texcoco: Prehispanic and Colonial Perspectives, edited by Galen Brokaw and Jongsoo Lee, 117-145. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2014.
“The Poetics and Politics of Aztec History.” In Thinking, Recording, and Writing History in the Ancient World, edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub, 372-390. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
“Castigos abominables: El Manuscrito del aperreamiento.” Arqueología Mexicana, vol. xx, no. 115 (May-June 2012):71-73.
“Manuscrito del aperreamiento (Manuscript of the Dogging): A ‘Dogging’ and its Implications for Early Colonial Cholula.” Ethnohistory, vol. 58, no. 4 (2011):585-611.
“The Spectacle of Death in Early Colonial New Spain in the Manuscrito del aperreamiento.” In Death and Afterlife in the Early Modern Hispanic World, edited by John Beusterien and Constance Cortez. Hispanic Issues On Line 7 (2010):144-163.
“Till Death Do Us Part: Unconventional Marriages as Aztec Political Strategy.” Ancient Mesoamerica vol. 18, no. 2: (2007)259-272.
“Clothing Women: The Female Body in Aztec Art of the Pre-Hispanic and Colonial Worlds.” In Woman and Art in Early Modern Latin America, edited by Richard E. Phillips and Kellen Kee McIntyre, pp. 223-247. Leiden: Brill Academic Press, 2006.
“Women and Political Power: The Inclusion and Exclusion of Noblewomen in Aztec Pictorial Histories.” Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics vol. 47, no. 2 (2005):82-106.
“From Aztec to Spanish: Shifting Alliances in the Tira de Tepechpan.” Latin American Indian Literatures Journal vol. 21, no. 2 (2005):165-194.
“Painting Colonial Mexico: The Appropriation of European Iconography in Mexican Manuscript Painting.” In Painted Books and Indigenous Knowledge in Mesoamerica: Manuscript Studies in Honor of Mary Elizabeth Smith, edited by Elizabeth H. Boone, pp. 301-317. New Orleans: Middle American Research Institute, 2005.