Keynote Speaker
Dr. Ángela Pérez-Villa, Western Michigan University.
Dr. Ángela Pérez-Villa is an Assistant Professor of History at Western Michigan University. She is a historian of Latin America who specializes in the social history of the law during Colombia’s early nineteenth-century wars of independence. She has been awarded distinguished fellowships and grants from the Mellon Foundation, the American Society for Legal History, the Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), and was appointed visiting scholar at the Latin American Centre at the University of Oxford in 2023-2024. Recently, the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education named her one of two 2025 Early Career Award Recipients. She’s currently finishing her first book manuscript on Colombia and has published academic articles in English and Spanish. Her Journal of Social History article “Enslaved Litigants, Emotions, and a Shifting Legal Landscape in Cauca, Colombia (1825-1831)” received the Honorable Mention for the 2024 Vanderwood Prize for Best Article from the Conference on Latin American History.
Archival Traps: The Fragility of Latin America's Past and Future Histories
In this keynote, Dr. Ángela Pérez-Villa (WMU) will reflect on her journey as an archival researcher, drawing on her work on Colombian women from the early 1800s. She will discuss how her encounters with the archives have shaped her methodologies as a historian, as well as her personal archival practices as a Latina in the United States. She will conclude by highlighting the thrilling possibilities as well as current threats facing archives across Latin America and what scholarly communities are doing to protect them.