The Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame has announced that Kellogg Institute Visiting Fellow Danielle Terrazas Williams was awarded a 2023 Cyprian Davis, OSB, Prize for her ongoing research project titled "Imagining Catholic Empires: Slavery, Freedom, and the Jesuits in Colonial Mexico."
Established in partnership with the American Catholic Historical Association, the prize recognizes outstanding research on the Black Catholic experience.
Terrazas Williams, who has been a Kellogg Visiting Fellow for the academic year 2022-23, is an 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.
Her project examines 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. She plans to publish this research as her second book.
Terrazas Williams is one of 26 scholars engaged in a variety of research projects that the Cushwa Center is funding for 2023. Funds will support research at the University of Notre Dame Archives and at other archives in a number of US cities – including Boston, Chicago, New York, San Antonio, and Washington, DC – as well as Limerick, Ireland; Llandudno, Wales; Paris, France; and Rome, Italy.
The Kellogg Institute for International Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, is an interdisciplinary community of scholars and students from across the University and around the globe that promotes research, provides educational opportunities, and builds partnerships throughout the world on the themes of global democracy and integral human development.