University of Leeds
Candidate for Executive Council (2025-27)
Candidate statement
My name is Danielle Terrazas Williams, and I would be honored to serve on the Executive Council of the American Catholic Historical Association. I earned my BA from Cornell University and my MA and PhD from Duke University. After postdoctoral opportunities at both Princeton University and Cornell University, I began my career as an assistant professor in the History Department at Oberlin College and Conservatory. After earning tenure and promotion at Oberlin, I joined the School of History at the University of Leeds in England, where I am an associate professor. My work examines how Spanish American institutions imagined marginalized people and how race and gender influenced the ways in which people navigated imperial demands and religious expectations. My broader research interests include the history of women, slavery studies, legal history, and history of the early modern Catholic Church. My first book, The Capital of Free Women: Race, Legitimacy, and Liberty in Colonial Mexico (Yale University Press, 2022), challenges traditional narratives of racial hierarchies and gendered mobility by focusing on free African-descended women. I have also published my work in The Americas, The Journal of Women’s History, Slavery & Abolition, The History of Religions, and (soon) the Journal of Jesuit Studies. I am currently working on my second book project, Imagining Catholic Empires: Slavery, Freedom, and the Jesuits in Colonial Mexico, which examines the rhetoric and tactics employed by the Society of Jesus to illuminate notions of Jesuit authority, colonial religiosity, and strategies of survival as Black people became subjects of contention in this burgeoning Spanish empire.
More than two decades ago, I chose to become a historian to better understand the inequalities experienced by African and African-descended people in the world. And while I specialize in the history of colonial Latin America, this global lens has informed my teaching, enriched my scholarship, and guided the service I commit to. I have oriented my career to attend to inequality in the academy by opening doors for first-generation, underrepresented, and underserved students and junior scholars. By serving as the faculty advisor for multiple student groups on campus, mentoring graduate students with a broad array of career interests, encouraging policy flexibility for PhD students affected by COVID-19, and promoting the scholarship of early career researchers, I have long demonstrated my commitment to widening the participation of researchers who, like myself at times, struggled to find their scholarly communities. In addition to supporting up-and-coming historians, I strongly believe that we in the ACHA can find proactive ways to support mid-career scholars who are navigating the waters towards full professorship. As a member of the Executive Council, my aim would be to continue to advocate for greater resources for junior scholars and for professionalization and mentorship opportunities for all scholars, regardless of rank.
As a historian of slavery in colonial Mexico, I have advocated for the greater centrality of Catholic history in understanding Latin American history. At Oberlin, I often joked to my students in my “Intro to Colonial Latin America” class that they had no idea they had signed up for a semester about the history of the early modern Catholic Church. I strongly believe that non-area specialists can benefit greatly from engaging with Latin American Catholic history, and I believe non-Catholic Studies scholars can enrich their historiographical base by engaging with our scholarship. While I am not new to the field of Catholic History, I am new to the ACHA, largely due to me believing that a historian of Mexico would not fit into the “American” Catholic Historical Association. However, I have deeply appreciated how warm members have been to me, and I very much value this new intellectual home. I hope that as a member of the Executive Council, I can help bridge those regional gaps between Latin America and the U.S. and be another welcoming face for those new to Catholic Studies.