Camilla Townsend

Assistant Professor of History (1995)

Degrees: BA Bryn Mawr College 1985; PhD Rutgers University 1995

Teaching Experience: Instituto Nacional Eliseo Picado, Matagalpa, Nicaragua 1987-88

Teaching Specialties: Latin American history, in comparative context

Research Interests: Colonial and early nineteenth-century New World, specifically the legacy of Hernando Cortes and Malinche in post-conquest Mexico; currently studying the Aztec language (Nahuatl); comparative New World economic culture focusing on the coastal Andean region and the Chesapeake

Publications: Tales of Two Cities: Race and Economic Culture in Early Republican North and South America: Guayaquil, Ecuador, and Baltimore, Maryland, 1820-1835 (forthcoming, University of Texas Press); "Half My Body Free, the Other Half Enslaved: the Politics of the Slaves of Guayas at the End of the Colonial Era" (Colonial Latin American Review, 1998); "Story Without Words: Women and the Creation of a Mestizo People in Guayaquil, 1820-1834" (Latin American Perspectives, 1997); "En busca de la libertad: los esfuerzos de los esclavos guayaquileños por garantizar su independencia" (Procesos, 1993); "Refusing to Travel la via Chilena: Working Class Women in Allende’s Chile" (Journal of Women’s History, 1993); various book reviews and contributions to anthologies

Dissertation: "Doing a Day’s Business in a New Nation: A Comparative Study of Daily Economic Activity in Two Early Republican Port Towns: Guayaquil, Ecuador and Baltimore, Maryland 1820-1835"

Fields in graduate school: Latin America, Early America, women’s history

Distinctions: Research fellow, Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies 1994-95; American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellow 1993-94; Fulbright Commission grant for study in Ecuador 1992-93

International Affiliations and Experience: Lived in Nicaragua 1987-88 and Ecuador 1992-93; extensive travel in Europe, Mexico and Central America

The border on this page is a detail from an Andean blanket.