Daniel Velásquez PhD

Biography

I’m a historian trained in a Vast Early America framework. My primary interests lie in the colonial-era borderlands where Indigenous, European, and African peoples interacted—places that test our understandings of empire—and the broader Atlantic World connections that shaped these contested spaces. Drawing on archival work in Britain, Spain, Mexico, and the U.S., my research traces transimperial smuggling in the eighteenth-century lower Mississippi River valley, the expansion of this illicit trade from Spanish Louisiana to Mexico facilitated by the American Revolution, and how the resulting intercolonial bonds created escape routes for Black Louisianians in the nineteenth century.

Beyond the archives, I am an enthusiastic proponent of making history accessible and relevant to broad audiences and have been involved in various Public History projects ranging from history podcast production to historic preservation. Most recently before coming to Western, I worked at UNC’s Institute for the Study of the Americas curating an oral history archive that chronicles the Latino experience in NC, delivering public presentations across the state on the long history of U.S.-Latin America connections, and contributing to the center’s efforts to expand language access.

In my free time, I enjoy hiking and traveling with my partner and spending time with our dog and cat.

Teaching areas: American History, Latin American History, Environmental History, Atlantic World History, History of the West, U.S.-Latin America Relations, U.S. Borderlands, Public History.