Danielle Terrazas Williams

Education

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

Biography

Danielle Terrazas Williams is a scholar of 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.  Currently, she is working on a book project tentatively titled Untethered Beings: Economic Networks and Gendered Challenges of Free Women of African Descent in Colonial Veracruz, which challenges traditional narratives of racial hierarchies and gendered mobility by focusing on Mexico’s understudied period from 1580-1730.  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.

Professor 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.