Marcella Hayes

Biography

I am a historian of Latin America and early modern Iberia, with an emphasis on the Andes. I study how Black people shaped early modern Iberian political life, using their ideas of community and methods of self-governance to rethink early modern concepts of belonging. In my research and teaching, I focus on inclusion and exclusion, political claims-making, and the development of categories of identity.

My book manuscript, under contract with University of Pennsylvania Press, is tentatively titled Black Lima: The Making of Corporate Culture and Self-Governance in Seventeenth-Century Lima. Black people were the majority of Lima’s population throughout the period, and they created officially recognized corporate bodies such as confraternities, militias, and guilds that included both free and enslaved people. I show that these women and men defined and defended their community by pursuing legal complaints, participating in civil defense, petitioning the king, voting for leaders, and organizing festivals. I argue that they carved out space in which enslaved people could have not only legal personhood, but also a degree of civic personhood.

I am developing a second project on the Black town criers and heralds of cities across the early modern Iberian empire. Criers were central to early modern society, providing a mostly illiterate population with access to news. In many cities, many (if not most) criers had some degree of African ancestry. I will show how the role of the crier opened a space for Black participation in the shaping and spread of important information.

My teaching fields include colonial Latin American history; modern Latin American history; early modern European history; histories of political mobilization; histories of race and gender.

Education

Ph.D., Harvard University
B.A., Cornell University

Selected Publications

• “Black Settlers Fight for Visibility,” in Knowing an Empire: Imperial Science in Early Modern Chinese and Spanish Empires, Mackenzie Cooley and Wu Huiyi, eds. (Lever Press, 2025), 358-383.
• “We Have Not Been Tributaries: Lima’s Black Community, Historical Memory, and the Power of Invention,” in Dissent and Disobedience From Within: Meanings and Practices of Resistance in the Iberian Worlds, 15th-19th Centuries, Pablo Sánchez León and Benita Herreros Cleret de Langavant, eds. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), 239-258.
• “They Have Been United as Sisters: Women Leaders of Black Lay Confraternities in Seventeenth-Century Lima,” The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History 79:4 (October 2022): 559-586.

Invited Talks & Research Presentations

• “Black Women Political Leaders of Seventeenth-Century Lima,” Annual Women’s History Month Lecture, Weber State University Department of History, March 2025
• Roundtable Participant, “Colonial Studies Section: New Directions on Colonial Women’s and Gender History,” American Historical Association Annual Meeting, New York, New York, January 2025
• “Women Leaders of Black Communities in Seventeenth-Century Lima,” Sixteenth Century Society Conference, Toronto, Canada, October 2024
• “Self-Governance and Civic Leadership in Black Confraternities in Seventeenth-Century Lima,” Brown Early American Graduate Seminar, April 2024
• “Friend of the Devil: A Black Artist Faces the Lima Inquisition, 1701,” with Ximena Gómez, Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Chicago, Illinois, March 2024
• “Black Self-Governance from the Margins in Seventeenth-Century Lima,” Early Modern Connected Histories Workshop, Central New York Humanities Corridor, February 2024
• “Slavery and Civic Leadership in Lima’s Black Confraternities,” Early Modern Workshop, Harvard University Department of History, February 2024
• “Self-Governance and the African Diaspora in Seventeenth-Century Lima,” Empires and Aftermath Research Cluster Seminar, University of Leeds (virtual talk), October 2023
• “Respect and Neglect: Black Confraternities and Self-Governance in Seventeenth-Century Lima,” The Making of Blackness in Early Modern Spain: A Process of Cultural and Social Negotiation from the Bottom-Up Project, University of Oxford/Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona (virtual talk), October 2023
• “Faith, Hope, Charity, Wax: Candlemakers as Confraternity Pawnbrokers in Seventeenth-Century Lima,” Sixteenth Century Society Conference, Baltimore, Maryland, October 2023
• “Amazons: West and West-Central African Roots of Black Women’s Political Power in Seventeenth-Century Lima,” Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, Santa Clara, California, July 2023

Selected Awards

• Center for the Humanities First Book Workshop Award, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2024
• Long-Term Fellowship, John Carter Brown Library, 2023-2024
• Honored Instructor Award, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2022
• Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award, 2018

History Courses

• HIST 201: The Historian’s Craft: Nation Breakers, Nation Makers: Revolution, Rebellion, and Reform in Latin America, undergraduate seminar (Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2025, Fall 2025, Spring 2026)
• HIST 300: History at Work, undergraduate seminar (Fall 2022)
• HIST/LACIS 243: Colonial Latin America, undergraduate survey (Fall 2021, Fall 2022, Fall 2024, Fall 2025)
• LACIS 260: Latin America: An Introduction, undergraduate survey (Spring 2022, Spring 2025)
• HIST/LACIS 982: Empire and Difference in Colonial Latin America, graduate seminar (Fall 2024)