Jessica Delgado is an Associate Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in Latin American History at the University of California at Berkeley in 2009 and taught at Princeton University in the religion Department from 2009-2019. Her primary areas of teaching and research are the histories of women, gender, sexuality, religion, and race in Latin America—particularly in Mexico in the 16^th, 17^th, and 18^th centuries—as well as critical archive studies and theories of historical thinking. 

Other areas of particular interest include: colonial Catholicism; gender, race, caste, and religion in the early modern Atlantic World; colonial and decolonial histories of time, space, and language; the materiality of devotion; the relationship between religiosity and people’s experiences of the physical world and embodiment; and the intersection between social and spiritual status. 

Her first book, Troubling Devotion: Laywomen and the Church in Colonial Mexico, 1630-1770, looks at the ways laywomen’s religiosity and daily interactions with religious authorities, institutions, symbols, and ideas shaped the devotional landscape of colonial Mexico. 

She is also co-editor, with Chris Tirres, of Religion in the Américas: Trans-hemispheric and Transcultural Approaches and has published a number of articles and book chapters on spiritual status, religion as a gendered historical and intersectional category of analysis, and other aspects of the histories of women, gender, religion, and Latin America.

Her current book project is called The Beata of the Black Habit: Race, Sexuality, and Religious Authority in Late Colonial Mexico takes the life and trial of an unknown female mystic to explore changes in religious culture, colonial power, and racialized ideologies of gender and sexuality in late eighteenth-century Mexico. This project is also in conversation with theories of embodiment, trauma and healing studies, and feminist studies of mysticism.

She has also been working in the area of critical archives theory for many years and has been a part of a number of collaborative endeavors related to this work. Growing out of this work is a collection of essays,  tentatively titled Love and Death in the Archives , as well as a companion edited anthology.