Emily Berquist

Emily Berquist Soule (born Washington, D.C.) is a historian of Colonial Latin America and the Spanish Empire.

Life

She grew up in Stratford, Connecticut and attended Vassar College, where she studied under James H. Merrell and graduated cum laude in History and Hispanic Studies. She studied Colonial Latin American History at the University of Texas at Austin, earning her Ph.D. there in 2007, studying under Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Susan Deans-Smith, among others. She is presently Professor of History at California State University, Long Beach, where she teaches courses on Colonial Latin America, with a special focus on the Atlantic Slave Trade, revolutions, visual culture, and religion. In 2013, she appeared as a historical consultant on the Travel Channel artifact hunting show "Digfellas."

In March 2014, her first book, The Bishop's Utopia: Envisioning Improvement in Colonial Peru, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, as part of the "Early Modern Americas" series, edited by Peter Mancall.

Her second book-in-progress, The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Rise and Fall of the Spanish Empireis under contract with Yale University Press. Starting in January 2023, she will join the team of Editors at Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, where she will be overseeing submissions and content focusing on Latin America and Africa.

Awards (selected)

2019-2020 Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellowship, Huntington Library
2014-2015 National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Award
2010-2011 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship
2010-2011 Dibner Fellowship in the History of Science, Huntington Library
2003-2004 Fulbright Fellowship

Works

• The Bishop's Utopia: Envisioning Improvement in Colonial Peru, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014, "The Early Modern Americas" series, edited by Peter C. Mancall
• “Early Antislavery Sentiment in the Spanish Atlantic World, 1765-1817,” Slavery & Abolition 31, no. 2 (June 2010): 181-207
• “Bishop Martínez Compañón’s Practical Utopia in Enlightenment Peru,” The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History 64, no. 3 (January 2008): 377-408

External links

• Faculty page at California State University, Long Beach
• Inside CSULB: NEH Grant Aids Berquist's Research