Erika Edwards

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Erika Denise Edwards joined the History Department in August 2012.

Curriculum Vitae

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS 

“The Making of a White Nation: The Disappearance of the Black Population in Argentina,” History Compass (online) June 2018 The Making of a White Nation

“A Tale of Two Cities: Buenos Aires, Cordoba and the Disappearance of the Black Population in Argentina” The Metropole, the official blog of the Urban History Association, May 2018  A Tale of Two Cities

“Pardo is the New Black: The Urban Origins of Argentina’s Myth of Black Disappearance” Global Urban History Blog Dec 2016. Pardo is the New Black 

Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women the Law and the Making of a White Argentine Republic

Argentina values the perception that it is only a country of European immigrants, making it an exception to other Latin American countries, which can embrace a more mixed—African, Indian, European—heritage. Her book traces the origins of what some white Argentines mischaracterize as a “black disappearance” by delving into the intimate lives of black women and explaining how they contributed to the making of a “white” Argentina. Erika Denise Edwards has produced the first comprehensive study in English of the history of African descendants outside of Buenos Aires in the late colonial and early republican periods, with a focus on how these women sought whiteness to better their lives and those of their children.

Edwards argues that attempts by black women to escape the stigma of blackness by recategorizing themselves and their descendants as white began as early as the late eighteenth century, challenging scholars who assert that the black population drastically declined at the end of the nineteenth century because of the whitening or modernization process. She further contends that in Córdoba, Argentina, women of African descent (such as wives, mothers, daughters, and concubines) were instrumental in shaping their own racial reclassifications and destinies.

Hiding in Plain Sight has won the 2021 Western Association of Women Historians Barbara “Penny” Kanner Book Award, the 2020 Association of Black Women Historians’ Letitia Woods-Brown Memorial Book Prize and  named one of the best books of 2020 by the African American Intellectual History Society.

COURSES

Undergraduate Courses

• AFRS 3270 Afro-Latin American History
• HIST 2000/WGST 2000 Hidden Figures: Women in Colonial Latin America
• HIST 2206/ LTAM 2206 Colonial Latin America
• HIST 2207/LTAM 2207 Modern Latin America
• HIST 3002/LTAM 3002 From Subjects to Citizens: The Long Nineteenth Century 1776-1930
• HIST 3002/LTAM 3002 Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women in the African Diaspora
• HIST 4000/LTAM 4000 African Descendants in Latin America: Historiography of the African Diaspora in Latin America
• LBST 2301: The Black Atlantic 1500-1800

Graduate Seminars

• HIST/LTAM/WGST 6000 Black Women and the African Diaspora
• HIST6201/LTAM 6521 Graduate Seminar: Colonial Latin America