Nathaniel Morris is a historian of modern Mexico, specialising in indigenous-state relations, autonomist movements and the drug trade. He is a Leverhulme Research Fellow at University College London, where he is working on indigenous vigilante groups in rural Mexico, and the ties of culture, identity and memory that link their modern incarnations (autodefensas and policías comunitarias) with their revolutionary-era predecessors, the so-called defensas sociales. He holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford, and his first book, entitled Soldiers, Saints and Shamans: Indian Communities and the Revolutionary State in Mexico’s Gran Nayar, 1910-1940, is currently under review with an academic press in the US.