Danielle Terrazas Williams

  • Associate Professor of History

Areas of Study

Education

  • PhD, Duke University 2013
  • MA, Duke University, 2008
  • BA, Cornell University, 2005

Biography

Danielle Terrazas Williams is a historian of colonial Latin American social and legal history with an emphasis on African-descended people in the colonial period. She has held postdoctoral research fellowships at the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University and at the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University.

She is currently finishing a book project, the Capital of Free Women: Race, Status, and Economic Networks in Colonial Veracruz, that aims to challenge traditional narratives of racial hierarchies and gendered mobility by focusing on African-descended women and their experiences in Mexico’s understudied period from 1580 to 1730. From royal edicts to local notarial and ecclesiastical sources, her project bridges the workings of the Spanish empire with the quotidian experiences of people and towns on the periphery.

Terrazas Williams offers courses on colonial and contemporary Latin America, including those that focus on the African Diaspora, women’s history, slavery, sexuality, religion, and social justice movements.

Notes

Danielle Terrazas Williams selected for visiting scholar position

April 23, 2021

Danielle Terrazas Williams was selected as a 2021-2022 Distinguished Visiting Scholar for the University at Buffalo's Center of Diversity Innovation.

Danielle Terrazas Williams gives public lecture

March 10, 2021

Assistant Professor of History Danielle Terrazas Williams gave a public lecture at the University of Oregon titled "Who Dared to Question the Word of a Priest?: Free Black Women and Capital in 17th-Century Mexico."

Danielle Terrazas Williams receives visiting fellowship

February 15, 2021

Assistant Professor of History Danielle Terrazas Williams is the recipient of a yearlong (2021-2022) visiting fellowship at Notre Dame University's Kellogg Institute for International Studies.

Danielle Terrazas Williams Presents Paper at Conference

December 15, 2019

Assistant Professor of History Danielle Terrazas Williams presented the paper, "Speaking the Same Language: Free Women, Maroons, and Parallel Expectations," at Harvard University's Afro-Latin American Research Institute's First Continental Conference on Afro-Latin American Studies.

Danielle Terrazas Williams Wins Kimberly Hanger Article Prize

September 11, 2019

Danielle Terrazas Williams won the 2019 Kimberly Hanger Article Prize from the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association for her work, "My Conscience is Free and Clear’: African-Descended Women, Status, and Slave Owning in Mid-Colonial Mexico."

Danielle Terrazas Williams Presents at Conference

August 6, 2019

Assistant Professor of History Danielle Terrazas Williams presents paper, "'I Do Not Owe Anything to Anyone': Seventeenth-Century Black Women Entrepreneurs on Mexico’s Royal Road" at the World History Association's 28th Annual Conference.

Danielle Terrazas Williams Wins Prize

April 28, 2019

Assistant Professor of History Danielle Terrazas Williams won the 2019 Judith Lee Ridge prize on April 26, 2019, from the Western Association of Women’s Historians for her article, “‘My Conscience is Free and Clear”: African-Descended Women, Status, and Slave Owning in Mid Colonial Mexico,” published in the Americas.

Danielle Terrazas Williams Awarded Fellowship

July 2, 2018

Danielle Terrazas Williams, assistant professor of history, was awarded a Huntington long-term fellowship to conduct research at the library for the 2018-2019 academic year.

Danielle Terrazas Williams Appointed

June 7, 2017

Assistant Professor of History Danielle Terrazas Williams was recently nominated and appointed to the President’s Council of Cornell Women.

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