James Lockhart

Biography

Professor Emeritus James Lockhart passed away peacefully on January 17, 2014, surrounded by his family, including his daughter and son, Elizabeth and John, and his wife, Mary Ann. Lockhart was one of the most original, accomplished scholars in the field of early Latin American history. He was born in West Virginia in 1933, where he attended the state university in Morgantown. He enrolled in the Army Language Institute and worked as a translator in post-war Europe, especially in Germany. His gift for learning languages led him to consider graduate study in Comparative Literature, but he decided to pursue a degree in History at the University of Wisconsin, where he wrote his dissertation on Spanish Peru. This was the basis of his first book, a classic study of Peruvian society in the 16th century. He taught at Colgate and the University of Texas before he settled down at UCLA in 1972. After writing two groundbreaking books on Peru, he began to shift his attention to Mexico, while publishing a collection of letters from sixteenth-century Spanish America with Enrique Otte, and a state-of-the-field textbook titled Early Latin Americawith Stuart Schwartz. Lockhart went on to pioneer the translation and analysis of archival Nahuatl-language texts from central Mexico, collaborating with several scholars from diverse disciplines, and became one of the world’s leading experts on the Nahuatl language, as it was written in the Roman alphabet from the mid-16th to the early 19th centuries. He edited a Nahuatl book series published by the UCLA Latin American Center and published several more books on the topic with Stanford University Press. His magnum opus, The Nahuas After the Conquest (1992), won multiple book prizes from the American Historical Association. He mentored dozens of graduate students before he retired from UCLA early in his career, in 1995. After retirement he moved from Santa Monica to Pine Mountain, California, where he continued to publish several books, to co-chair dissertation committees, to help others publish books, and to work with scholars and students around the world via the mail and internet–until the last few weeks of his life. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2012 he received the XIV Banamex Prize for Mexican History in Mexico City.

Jim, as he is known to us, was very fond of Renaissance music and enjoyed playing the lute, vihuela, mandolin, recorder, and classical guitar with family and friends. He also found joy in woodworking and was good enough at it to craft his own furniture and musical instruments. He was an avid sports fan. He liked hiking in the mountains, and with Mary Ann became an active member of the Sierra Club. Most of all, he loved to teach students who were eager to learn, and his genuine enthusiasm for knowledge and generosity was contagious. He will be missed, to say the least, but he and his brilliant work will never be forgotten. A memorial gathering and conference in his honor are now in the planning.