Matthew Restall was born in London, England, and was schooled in England while growing up in Madrid, Caracas, and Tokyo.  He received degrees in History at Oxford University and at the University of California, Los Angeles. For almost three decades, he has lived in Pennsylvania, where he is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Anthropology at the Pennsylvania State University. For 25 years, he directed Penn State's Latin American Studies program. He has written twenty-four books (forty-one counting all editions, in eight languages), and some eighty articles/essays, focusing on five areas of specialization: the history of colonial Mesoamerica, primarily Yucatan; Aztec and Maya history; Africans in Spanish America; the Spanish Conquest era in the Americas; and the history of popular music.

The 2020s have been productive for Professor Restall so far. His books in this decade include three collaborations with art historian Amara Solari: The Friar and the Maya (winner of the 2023 CLAH prize for best book on Mexican history); The Maya (2020, in Oxford’s Very Short Introductions series, also now in Chinese); and The Maya Apocalypse and its Western Roots (2021). Also recent is the updated edition of Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (2021; 2022 in Chinese), and Entre Mayas y Españoles (a 2020 translation of The Black Middle). Following his entry into the field of pop music history with Blue Moves (2020, in the 33 1/3 series) are two new musicology monographs: Ghosts: Journeys to Post-pop (December 2024), and On Elton John (March 2025 in Oxford’s Opinionated Guides series). His newest book, published in October of 2025 by Norton, is The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus.

In addition to the above, Restall’s work on Maya history includes The Maya World (1997), Maya Conquistador (1998), and the co-authored volumes Mesoamerican Voices (2005) and Return to Ixil (2019). His books on Afro-Spanish America include two edited volumes, Beyond Black and Red (2005) and Black Mexico (2009), and a monograph, The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan, that won the 2009 CLAH prize for best book on Mexican history.

His contributions to the New Conquest History include Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (published in five languages), Invading Guatemala (2007, in Penn State Press’ Latin American Originals series, of which he is founding editor), and his co-authored The Conquistadors (published in four languages). The newest, When Montezuma Met Cortés: A True History of the Meeting that Changed History (2018), also available in Spanish and in Chinese, won the 2020 Cline Prize for best book on Indigenous history.

Restall has written two textbooks with Kris Lane: Latin America in Colonial Times (2011; 2018) and The Riddle of Latin America (2011). He and Lane are editors of Cambridge University Press’s Cambridge Latin American Studies book series. Restall was senior co-editor of Ethnohistory (2007-2016) and of the Hispanic American Historical Review (2017-2022).

The recipient of three full-year National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship, Restall has also held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and at Brown’s John Carter Brown Library (JCB)—where he served on the Board of Governors for 2014-23. He has been a fellow at the Library of Congress's Kluge Center, at the US Capitol (twice), at the University of London, a visiting scholar at Dumbarton Oaks, and in 2020 he was Greenleaf Distinguished Chair of Latin American Studies at Tulane University. He is a Past President of the American Society for Ethnohistory