Savannah Esquivel specializes in the art and material culture of the Hispanic Americas, with a particular emphasis on Mexico. Her research focuses on the artistic and sociopolitical interventions made by Nahua communities within Christian religious spaces in colonial Mexico. Current article-length projects investigate the soundscape of Franciscan convent churches, landscape mural painting and the ecological impacts of settler-colonialism in the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley, and discourses of Indigenous presence and absence in Spanish colonial sources and art historical methodologies. She is at work on a book-length project, tentatively titled Indigenous Insiders: Landscape, Light, and Sound in Mexico’s Colonial Convents, which examines how Indigenous communities used Franciscan convents— their imagery, sounds, spaces, and institutional structure—to challenge settler-colonialism in colonial Mexico.

Esquivel is a Faculty Affiliate of the UCLA Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. In 2023-2024, Esquivel will be the Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellow in The Huntington-UC Program for the Advancement of the Humanities, an innovative partnership designed to advance the humanities at public universities.

Review of Ana Pulido Rull, Mapping Indigenous Lands: Native Land Grants in Colonial New Spain: Native Land Grants in New Spain, for Ethnohistory 69, no. 3 (2022): 366–367.

Review of Tony Ballantyne, Lachy Paterson & Angela Wanhalla, eds. Indigenous Textual Cultures: Reading and Writing in the Age of Global Empire, for Native American and Indigenous Studies 9, no. 2 (Fall 2022): 195-197.