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.

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.