Michelle McKinley Wins Newberry Fellowship

UO law professor Michelle McKinley

University of Oregon law professor Michelle McKinley has been awarded a Newberry Library Short-Term Resident Fellowship for Individual Research for her work-in-progress titled “Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Legal Activism, and Ecclesiastical Courts in Colonial Lima, 1593-1700.”

A member of the CSWS Women of Color Junior Faculty Project, McKinley began teaching at the UO in 2007. She is researching legal actions taken by  female slaves to achieve formal emancipation in 17th-century Peru. The fellowship supports her scholarship at the Newberry Library collection in Chicago. Speaking to the Oregon Daily Emerald student newspaper, McKinley commented: “I want people to look at the experience of slavery in a more nuanced and historically accurate way. I want to look at the ways that law can be used for social justice and as a means of repression, all during which I would like to make a contribution to Afro-Peruvian history.“