Louise M. Burkhart (born 1958)[1] is an American academic ethnohistorian and anthropologist, noted as a scholar of early colonial Mesoamerican literature.
Her work examines the historical documentation from the time of the Spanish Conquest and the subsequent era of colonial Mexico, and studies the continuities and transformations of indigenous Nahua communities and culture.
She has also published research on the aesthetics and iconography of pre-Columbian and Indochristian art, Nahuatl linguistics, and the rise of the Virgin of Guadalupe cult within Mexican Roman Catholicism.
[2] After obtaining her master's degree Burkhart enrolled in Yale's doctorate studies program in anthropology, while also working as instructor and teaching assistant for courses on Nahuatl literature and Native American ethnography.
Her dissertation, "The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico", was revised and published as a book in 1989 by University of Arizona Press.