Ben Leeming is an independent scholar from the Boston area who works in the field of colonial Mexican ethnohistory. He is also the John B. Jarzavek Teaching Chair and Chair of History at The Rivers School in Weston, MA, where he has taught since 1996. Leeming completed his Ph.D. in Anthropology in 2017 under the direction of Louise M. Burkhart at the University at Albany, SUNY. For nearly twenty years Leeming has been a student of the Nahuatl language, the lingua franca of the Aztec empire prior to European contact, and the language of Christian evangelization in the colony of New Spain (Mexico). His research focuses on the translation practices developed by early Franciscans and their Native assistants, their efforts to render Christian doctrine intelligible to Native audiences, and the diverse “Christianities” that resulted from these processes, as well as Nahuatl-Christian textual production, colonial Nahuatl theater, and Indigenous apocalypticism. Leeming’s first book is titled Aztec Antichrist: Performing the Apocalypse in Early Colonial Mexico (University Press of Colorado, 2022). It presents the translation and analysis of two previously-unknown Nahuatl Antichrist plays that he discovered while doing archival research in 2014. His current project, funded by a year-long grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2021–2022), involves translating a collection of Nahuatl sermons written by the eminent Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and his Nahua students at the Colegio de Santa Cruz, Tlatelolco (Mexico City) between the years 1536–1540. The resulting work is under advanced contract with the University of Utah Press. Leeming’s future projects will make additional works of Nahuatl religious literature available in translation in order to promote ongoing studies of the religious experiences of early colonial Mexico’s Nahuatl-speaking peoples. 

Bio sourced from https://rivers.academia.edu/BenLeeming.