Michelle McKinley
March 31, 2015—Michelle McKinley, an associate professor in the University of Oregon School of Law and a long-time faculty affiliate and board member of the UO Center for the Study of Women in Society, has been named a 2015 Fulbright Fellow. This prestigious fellowship will support the expansion of McKinley’s work on Hispanic urban slavery to Cartagena, Colombia and the viceroyalty of Nuevo Granada (now Bogotá).
Currently on fellowship at Princeton University’s Program in Law and Public Affairs (LAPA), Professor McKinley is conducting archival research for her project “Degrees of Freedom: Intimacy, Slavery, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Latin America.” This project explores the issues with enslaved women as legal actors within the landscape of Hispanic urban slavery, in reference to women who are socially disfavored, economically active, and extremely litigious. Professor McKinley’s research has been supported in the past by a CSWS Faculty Research Grant, research interest group activities, works-in-progress talks, and through publications. Part of her new project that starts with the Fulbright—“Bound Biographies: Reconstructing the Lives of African Descent Peoples in the Early Modern Iberoamerican World, 1585-1685”—is being funded by a 2015-16 CSWS Faculty Research Grant.
Professor McKinley, who began teaching at UO in 2007, is the Bernard B. Kliks Associate Professor of Law. Among her many other honors, she has previously been the recipient of an NEH Fellowship, Newberry Fellowship, ACLS Fellowship, Surrency Prize, and NSF grant. Professor McKinley attended Harvard Law School, where she was executive editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal and graduated cum laude in 1995. She also holds a master’s degree in social anthropology from Oxford University.
She is the former managing director of Cultural Survival, an advocacy and research organization dedicated to indigenous peoples. She is also the founder, and former director, of the Amazonian Peoples’ Resources Initiative, a community-based reproductive rights organization in Peru, where she worked for nine years as an advocate for global health and human rights.
