Timo Schaefer is a historian of Mexican legal culture. His Ph.D. dissertation won the 2015 Esther L. Kinsley Ph.D. Dissertation Award from Indiana University and the 2015 CGS/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Humanities and Fine Arts from the Council of Graduate Schools. Schaefer is the author of Liberalism as Utopia: The Rise and Fall of Legal Rule in Post-Colonial Mexico, 1820-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), winner of the LASA Mexico 2018 Book prize. He is also author of articles that have appeared in the Hispanic American Historical Review, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, Journal of Social History, and Third World Quarterly. His new project is a collective biography of social-movement leaders and politicians that aims to shed light on the informal politics of protest, repression, and democratic reform in Southern Mexico between 1980 and 2010.