Boxes marked “Allied Van Lines” crowded Claudio Lomnitz’s office at the New School. On the first day of classes, Mr. Lomnitz settled into his role as a new anthropology and historical studies professor at the university and began filling the empty bookcases behind his desk.

Mr. Lomnitz joins a small department – he is one of only three faculty members. His colleagues are Adriana Petryna, who studies medical anthropology, and the department chair, Ann Laura Stoler, an authority on colonialism. The move is quite a change from his previous posts at the University of Chicago (where he taught for the last nine years), and, before that, New York University.

Asked if he saw this as a new beginning, Mr. Lomnitz replied: “Multiple beginnings.” In addition to the new professorship, he has just been appointed editor of a journal called Public Culture, and is embarking work on a new research project – on “the history of the future.”

The history of the future is also the subject of a graduate course he’ll be teaching this semester. Sound paradoxical? In his work, Mr. Lomnitz explores how individuals and cultures view their own future as a society. Perspectives change over time, he said. Scholarly investigations have more often focused on how the realities of the present shape a society’s view of its past – however, Mr. Lomnitz argued that there is an emerging interest in the history of people’s expectations.

Mr. Lomnitz’s other course for the autumn also has a theoretical bent, but it fits somewhat more neatly in a traditional anthropology curriculum. That class covers Latin American revolutions in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Latin America has been an ongoing area of interest for the Chilean born professor. His parents now live in Mexico, where his mother is a retired teacher, who maintains an academic interest in family and class (his father studies earthquakes).

As an undergraduate at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa in Mexico City – Mexico’s answer to CUNY, he said – Mr. Lomnitz was influenced by a philosopher and former Jesuit, Porfirio Miranda, a Hegelian with interests in social justice. He was passionately engaged in thought “in a kind of playful way.”

While pursuing his Ph.D. at Stanford, his interest in Latin America grew. Brazil scholar Richard Morse introduced Mr. Lomnitz to the region’s intellectual history. Mr. Morse was the first person he met who “didn’t see Latin America as a problem to be solved but as a life-world.”

A year of study with historian Philippe Aries in Paris planted a seed for Mr. Lomnitz’s most recent book, “Death and the Idea of Mexico,” forthcoming from Zone Books next year.

Mexico’s ease and familiarity with traditions and representations of the dead are often noted, Mr. Lomnitz said, but its singularity and cause has never fully been explained. His book does so.

He has an ongoing interest in the history of Latin American intellectuals, including small-town thinkers in Mexico, as well as the cultural history of corruption. While at Chicago, Mr. Lomnitz organized a notable conference on corruption that aimed to get beyond trivial assertions such as “we have always had corruption.” That statement may be true, he said, but corruption has taken different forms and has not always been a salient political issue in Mexico.

After having worked and studied in both Mexico and America, Mr. Lomnitz has a unique view of the difference between scholarship in the countries. When asked about the difference between Mexican and American anthropology, he said Mexican anthropology has “tended to be about Mexico” and has generally focused on pragmatic fieldwork. By contrast, American anthropology – with the exception of studies on American Indians – has historically looked outward and centered on other parts of the world than America, he said.

As the editor of Public Culture, Mr. Lomnitz hopes to deepen international connection with the journal. It is an interdisciplinary journal of cultural studies published three times a year by the Duke University Press, whose founding editors, Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, are both at the New School.

While the essay form has traditionally dominated the magazine, he intends to encourage other kinds of submissions such as short correspondence that can “put on the table issues for discussion” that others might build on. He said he also wants the magazine to further explore various ways to document contemporary processes.

Mr. Lomnitz noted that New York is a great place to teach and study anthropology: He is pleased by the New School’s location, in a cosmopolitan city, with the CUNY Graduate Center, Columbia, and New York University nearby, and Yale and Princeton relatively close as well. “I think it’s the biggest hub that there is.”

The fact that both the new provost, Mr. Appadurai, who studies globalization, is an anthropologist and the new dean of the Graduate Faculty, Benjamin Lee, is also an anthropologist, specializing in global cultural studies and contemporary Chinese culture, “makes me very optimistic about the prospect of anthropology at the New School, as you can imagine.”