Ángela Pérez-Villa

Photo of Ángela Pérez-Villa
Ángela Pérez-Villa
Assistant Professor of History
Office: 
(269) 387-4109
Location: 
4438 Friedmann Hall, Mail Stop 5334
Mailing address: 
Department of History
Western Michigan University
1903 W Michigan Ave
Kalamazoo MI 49008-5334 USA
Office hours: 

On fellowship leave 2023-2024

Education: 
  • Ph.D., History and Women's Studies, University of Michigan, 2017
  • M.A., History, University of Michigan, 2011
  • B.A., History, Summa Cum Laude, City University of New York (CUNY), 2009
Bio: 

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. She was selected as a J. Willard Hurst Fellow in 2021 and as a 12-month Career Enhancement Fellow in 2023. 

She's spending the 2023-2024 academic year as Academic visitor in the Latin American Centre at the University of Oxford, England, where she's revising her first book manuscript about the social history of the law during Colombia's wars of independence in the early nineteenth century.

Recent publications:

"Enslaved Litigants, Emotions, and a Shifting Legal Landscape in Cauca, Colombia (1825-1831)," Journal of Social History 57, no. 1 (August 1, 2023): 49-77

"Dinner, Dance and Death: Everyday Life and the Administration of Justice in Popayan during the Restoration of Monarchical Rule, 1815-1819," Revista Historia y Justicia, no. 15 (November 30, 2020).

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 also taught a graduate-level course on Sex and Power in Latin America. She has experience lecturing in the classroom as well as in hybrid and asynchronous modalities.

 Community:

In Spring 2023, students in her HIST 3160 (Women in U.S. History) class created a digital history project with members of the Kalamazoo community inspired by Tiya Miles's award-winning book, All That She Carried. The project was supported by a public humanities mini grant from WMU's Center for the Humanities.

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).