Ursula RallGraduate Student

I am a fifth-year doctoral candidate studying colonial Latin America. I am currently writing my dissertation, which explores the spatial mobility of women of African descent within and between Mexico City, Puebla, and Veracruz from 1580 until 1745. This research highlights how the social networks that Black women formed across urban centers were key to the socio-economic mobility of the Black Mexican population during the seventeenth century. Furthermore, I argue that Afro-descended women had a sense of a shared racialized and gendered community, forming close ties and financial networks that improved their social and material lives.

My research has been supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Abroad Grant, the American Historical Association, the Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions, the Conference on Latin American History, Emory University's Halle Institute for Global Research, and Emory University's History Department.

Education

• B.A. Bates College

Research Interests

Gender, Race, and Colonial Mexico

Dissertation Topic

"Forging Inter-Urban Communities: The Spatial Mobility and Social Networks of Women of African Descent in New Spain: 1580-1745"

Faculty Advisors