Professor David Tavárez is the author of The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico, (2011, Stanford), editor of Words and Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America (2017, Colorado), and coauthor of Painted Words: Nahua Catholicism, Politics, and Memory in the Atzaqualco Pictorial Catechism (2017, Dumbarton Oaks, with Elizabeth Boone and Louise Burkhart), and Chimalpahin's Conquest: A Nahua Historian's Rewriting of Francisco López de Gómara's La conquista de México (2010, Stanford, with Susan Schroeder, Anne Cruz, and Cristián Roa).

Two of these books were published in Spanish as Las guerras invisibles (2012, UABJO-ColMich-CIESAS-UAM), and Chimalpáhin y La Conquista de México (2012, UNAM).

Currently a 2017-18 Guggenheim Fellow, his research has also been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the John Carter Brown Library. He has co-advised doctoral dissertations at the Postgraduate Program in Mesoamerican Studies (UNAM), the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and CIESAS, and served as Councilor of the American Society for Ethnohistory, Chair and Secretary of CLAH's Mexican Studies Committee, and editorial board member of Ethnohistory.