About

This profile was current as of 2023, when she was part of the on-campus Kellogg community.

Kellogg Visiting Fellow Danielle Terrazas Williams is associate professor of history at the University of Leeds. Her work focuses on the social and legal histories of African-descended people in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico. Her research interests include women’s history, governance, slavery, family, and notions of class and status. 

Terrazas Williams will work on her second book project during her time with the Kellogg Institute. “Imagining Catholic Empires: Slavery, Freedom, and the Jesuits in Colonial Mexico” will examine one of the most prolific Catholic religious orders - the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits - and their role in the ministry of African-descended people in Mexico, exploring larger questions of early modern governance and religious acculturation in Mexico.

Her first book project, “The Capital of Free Women: Race, Status, and Economic Networks in Colonial Veracruz,” challenged 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. 

Terrazas Williams’ other scholarship on the Jesuits, legal culture, and early modern women has appeared in History of Religions, Journal of Women’s History, Ulúa, The Americas, and Routledge’s Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World. 

Terrazas Williams previously was an associate professor of history at Oberlin College. She holds a PhD from Duke University.

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