Ángela Pérez-Villa

Ángela Pérez-Villa (MA, PhD University of Michigan) is a historian of Latin America with a particular interest in the legal, social, and gender history of Colombia. Prior to her post as Assistant Professor of History at Western Michigan University, she was the inaugural Alfred J. Hanna Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Rollins College, Florida and a Graduate Fellow at the Program in Race, Law, and History at the University of Michigan’s Law School. After an invitation to present at a British Academy Conference held at the University of Oxford in 2022, Ángela returned a year later as Academic Visitor at the Latin American Centre and Associate Member of Exeter College. At Oxford, she revised her first book manuscript, which examines daily life and legal practice during Colombia’s Wars of Independence (1808-1831) by demonstrating how political and legal power were disputed and reconfigured locally on the terrains of family, sexuality, and gender. To do so, the book interrogates the judicial archive in order to bring to light vulnerable or silenced historical subjects like enslaved women whose stories illustrate life in wartime while complicating conventional metanarratives of slavery and independence in the Colombian Southwest. While in the UK, Ángela presented her book project at the Oxford Latin American History Seminar, the Imagining Emancipation Workshop at the University of Exeter, and at Northumbria University as part of the “Reframing the Age of Revolutions” Research Network. She has been awarded distinguished fellowships that have funded her historical research and writing including the 2021 J. Willard Hurst Institute Fellowship by the American Society for Legal History as well as the 2023 12-month Career Enhancement Fellowship by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation). Her most recent academic articles in English and in Spanish can be found in the Journal of Social History and Historia y Justicia.