Brent Metz

Dr. Brent Metz — Senior Research Fellow 

Director, Mesoamerican Initiative, Neotropical Anthropology Laboratory (NAL)

Director, Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies (CLACS)

Professor of Anthropology, University of Kansas

Dr. Brent E. Metz is a sociocultural anthropologist, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kansas, and Director of KU’s Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies (CLACS). He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Neotropical Anthropology Laboratory (NAL), where he directs the Mesoamerican Initiative, coordinating long-term, collaborative research across Central America and southern Mexico.

Education. Dr. Metz earned his Bachelor of Arts in Spanish and Anthropology from the Western Michigan University Honors College in 1986. He completed his Master of Arts in Anthropology at the University of Michigan in 1989 and received his PhD in Anthropology from the University at Albany, State University of New York in 1995.

Dr. Metz has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, Costa Rica, Spain, and among migrant farmworker communities in the United States, particularly in Michigan. His primary research population has been the Ch’orti’ Maya of the tri-border region of eastern Guatemala, western Honduras, and northwestern El Salvador. His work addresses Indigenous revitalization, migration, political and interpersonal violence, gender, religious conversion, community-based participatory research, and collaborative grassroots development.

Dr. Metz is the author and editor of major scholarly works on Mesoamerican Indigenous societies, including:

• Ch’orti’-Maya Survival in Eastern Guatemala: Indigeneity in Transition (University of New Mexico Press)
• The Ch’orti’ Maya Area: Past and Present (University Press of Florida), co-edited with Cameron L. McNeil and Kerry M. Hull
• Where Did the Eastern Mayas Go?: The Historical, Relational, and Contingent Interplay of Ch’orti’ Indigeneity (University Press of Colorado)

As Director of CLACS, Dr. Metz provides institutional leadership for interdisciplinary research, training, and public engagement across Latin America and the Caribbean. Within NAL, his leadership of the Mesoamerican Initiative emphasizes long-term ethnographic collaboration, participatory research methodologies, integration of scholarship with development practice and policy dialogue, and ethical field training.

Brent Metz’s work exemplifies anthropology as a sustained, reciprocal scholarly practice grounded in deep regional expertise and long-term community engagement.