Dr. Ana María Silva Campo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She specializes in the era of Spanish colonial rule in the region that is now Colombia.

Her first book, The Inquisition’s Gambit: Making Wealth and Race in Cartagena de Indias (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2026), examines how religious persecution became a tool for creating racialized economic hierarchies in the early modern Spanish Atlantic world. The book focuses on Cartagena de Indias, a Caribbean port city in modern Colombia that held a unique position as the Spanish Empire’s only location where the trade in African captives and an Inquisition tribunal operated side by side during the seventeenth century. Drawing on financial records from Inquisition archives, the book shows how the Inquisition used property confiscation to redistribute wealth along religious and racialized lines. The Inquisition seized real estate and other property from prosperous Black women accused of witchcraft and descendants of Portuguese Jews, then sold it to men of Spanish, Catholic lineages. Through careful mapping of real estate records, the book reveals how the Inquisition’s selective persecution and dispossession created lasting economic hierarchies in Cartagena.

Dr. Silva Campo’s work has appeared in the Hispanic American Historical Review, the Colonial Latin American Review, and Varia História. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Casa de Velázquez, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at UNC. 

Dr. Silva Campo’s next research project traces how gold jewelry functioned as both material inheritance and spiritual currency in families transitioning from slavery to freedom in the seventeenth-century Pacific mining region around Cali, Colombia. Building on evidence that formerly enslaved women wore gold jewelry to signal their legal status, she examines how families used these objects to navigate inheritance, social identity, and Catholic afterlife provisions. Through judicial, notarial, and parish records from Cali and Spain, this project traces the human stories behind colonial gold production and mining.

Dr. Silva Campo teaches courses on Latin America under colonial rule, law and society in Latin America, witchcraft and magic in the early modern world, women and gender in Latin America, and the history of mapping and spatial data.

She is originally from Bogotá, Colombia, and a graduate from Universidad de Los Andes. She received her PhD in History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  

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.

En español:

“Pleitos civiles ante el tribunal de la Inquisición: Privilegios judiciales y poder local en Cartagena de Indias (s. XVII-XVIII),” in “Processos judiciais e escrita da história na América Latina e Caribe,” eds. Mariana Armond Dias Paes and Pedro Jiménez Cantisano, special issue, Varia História 37: 74 (May-August 2021): 361-391. 

Youtube: “Mujeres afrodescendientes, brujería y la transformación urbana de Cartagena de Indias” 

Affiliations

Contact

anasilva@unc.edu
Department of History
418 Pauli Murray Hall. CB 3195
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3265