Western Michigan University
1903 W Michigan Ave
Kalamazoo MI 49008-5334 USA
- Ph.D., History and Women's Studies, University of Michigan, 2017
- M.A., History, University of Michigan, 2011
- B.A., History, City University of New York (CUNY), 2009
Dr. Ángela Pérez-Villa is a historian of Latin America with a particular interest in the legal, social, and gender history of Colombia. She holds a PhD from the University of Michigan's Joint Program in History and Women's Studies. Prior to arriving at WMU, Dr. Pérez-Villa was the Alfred J. Hanna Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Rollins College, Florida and a Graduate Fellow at the Program in Race, Law, and History at the University of Michigan’s Law School. In 2021, she was selected as a J. Willard Hurst Fellow and participated in the Summer Institute in Legal History organized by the American Society for Legal History and the University of Wisconsin Law School.
At WMU, she has developed a dynamic research agenda that considers her interests in late colonial histories of gender, violence, slavery, and the law. She is currently working on her first book manuscript, which explores the subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways that violence and gender shaped social relations of power in southwestern Colombia at a critical historical turning point from Spanish colony to independent state in the early nineteenth century. It specifically seeks to show how during the wars of independence, political power and legal practice in southwestern Colombia were disputed and reconfigured locally on the terrains of family, sexuality, and gender.
As a first-gen professor, Dr. Pérez-Villa enjoys mentoring and working with students from different backgrounds including transfer, non-traditional, and immigrant students. Outside of work, she likes to watch professional cycling and ride her bike around town when the weather allows it. If asked, she will tell students about the day she signed up for her first metric century bike ride at an event in St. Augustine, Florida and ended up completing not 100k but 100 miles in six hours!
Teaching Interests:
Dr. Pérez-Villa teaches general education and upper-level courses on World History after 1500; Colonial Latin America; Slavery and Freedom in Latin America and the Caribbean; and Women’s History. She has experience lecturing in the classroom as well as in hybrid and asynchronous modalities.
Community:
Dr. Ángela Pérez-Villa was profiled as one of three professors who inspire Latinx students in the Kalamazoo area by New/Nueva Opinion, a Spanish-language newspaper in Southwest Michigan (pgs. 4-5).