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Assistant Professor
418 Pauli Murray Hall
Office Hours: W 1:30-3:30 pm and by appointment
anasilva@unc.edu
Personal Website

Education

BA Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá (Colombia), 2008
MA University of Michigan, 2013
PhD University of Michigan, 2018

Research Interests

Ana María Silva Campo is a historian of race, gender, religion, and the law in colonial Latin American cities. Her book manuscript, Travelers of the Half Moon Gate, studies the formation of religious, gendered, and increasingly racialized hierarchies in Cartagena de Indias, the main port for the trade in African captives in Spanish South America during the seventeenth century. It examines the tension between the political economy of the trade in African captives and Spain’s imperial project to enforce religious orthodoxy. Using the rarely studied financial archives of the tribunal of the Inquisition in Cartagena, Travelers of the Half Moon Gate shows how the Inquisition transformed the city by confiscating and reselling the houses of free women of African descent while preserving the networks that sustained the trade in African captives during the seventeenth century.
[Dr. Silva Campo will be on leave 2022-2023.]

Some Notable Publications

“Through the Gate of the Media Luna: Slavery and the Geographies of Legal Status in Colonial Cartagena de Indias,” in The Hispanic American Historical Review 100: 3 (August 2020): 391-421.

“Fragile Fortunes: Afro-descended Women, Property Seizures, and the Remaking of Urban Cartagena,” in Colonial Latin American Review 30: 2 (May 2021): 197-213.

Graduate Students

  • This faculty member is accepting applicants for the 2023-2024 cycle
  • Courses Taught (as schedule allows)

    For current information about course offerings, click here.

  • History 89: First Year Seminar: Witchcraft and Magic in the Early Modern World
  • History 142: Latin America Under Colonial Rule
  • History 280: Women and Gender in Latin America
  • History 314: Law and Society in Latin America