Participant Info

First Name
Andreina
Last Name
Soto
Country
United States
State
PA Pennsylvania
Affiliation
UC Santa Barbara
Website URL
https://andreinasoto.com/
Keywords
African diaspora; Blackness; Latin America; colonial; Caribbean; Venezuela; law; religion; geography; public history; digital humanities
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
other credentials

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

I am a doctoral candidate in History at UC Santa Barbara. My dissertation “A Place of Paradoxes: Black People’s Legal Strategies in Early Modern Venezuela” examines how men of African descent adapted and appropriated different legal strategies in an effort to transform imperial laws, social practices, and juridical spaces in the Province of Venezuela between the years 1670 and 1750. I draw from new approaches in global legal history and African diaspora studies to deconstruct our understanding of Ibero-American legal systems and characterize them not as state-imposed laws but the product of negotiations and adaptations by local actors in the Americas. Likewise, I use digital humanities and cultural geography in an effort to understand how these practices affected and physically transformed the landscape of early modern Venezuela. 

Throughout my graduated studies I fell in love with public history and I strive to make historical scholarship accessible to wide audiences. For the past two years, I have served as board member and project coordinator for the digital humanities non-profit Neogranadina, and as Editorial Assistant for the Journal The Public Historian.

I recently moved from Santa Barbara (CA) to Philadelphia to start a new position as Center Administrator of The Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public History Interest.

Recent Publications
Media Coverage
Country Focus
Expertise by Geography
Atlantic, Caribbean, Latin America, Spain
Expertise by Chronology
17th century, 18th century
Expertise by Topic
Colonialism, Law, Local & Regional, Public History, Race, Religion, Slavery