Christina Marie Villarreal, Ph.D.
Christina Marie Villarreal, Ph.D.
Dr. Christina Marie Villarreal is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). Her research focuses on the Texas-Louisiana borderlands, early America, fugitives from slavery, desertion, and sanctuary. Her recent publication, “Black Fugitive Strategies: Slavery and Self-Emancipation in the Spanish Gulf Coast Borderlands,” appears in At the Heart of the Borderlands: Africans and Afro-descendants on the Edges of Colonial Spanish America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2023). Villarreal has received support for her research from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Program, The Institute for Citizens & Scholars, and the SSRC-Mellon Mays Program. In 2021-2022, Villarreal was a Research Fellow at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University, where she worked on her forthcoming manuscript, “Imperial Fugitives: Apostates, Deserters, and Runaways in Eighteenth-Century Texas and Louisiana Borderlands, 1714-1803.”