Emily Berquist

Emily Kay Berquist (born Washington, D.C.) is a historian of Colonial Latin America and the Spanish Empire.

She grew up in Stratford, Connecticut, in a 1753 Gambrel colonial house that her parents restored by hand. She attended Vassar College, where she studied under James H. Merrell and graduated cum laude in History and Hispanic Studies. She studied Colonial Latin American History at the University of Texas at Austin, earning her Ph.D. there in 2007, studying under Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Susan Deans-Smith, among others. She is presently Associate Professor of History at California State University, Long Beach. In 2013, she appeared as a historical consultant on the Travel Channel artifact hunting show "Digfellas."

In March 2014, her first book, The Bishop's Utopia: Envisioning Improvement in Colonial Peru[1] was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, as part of the "Early Modern Americas" series, edited by Peter Mancall.

2014-2015 National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Award
2010-2011 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship
2010-2011 Dibner Fellowship in the History of Science, Huntington Library
2003-2004 Fulbright Fellowship

The Bishop's Utopia: Envisioning Improvement in Colonial Peru, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014, "The Early Modern Americas" series, edited by Peter C. Mancall
“Early Antislavery Sentiment in the Spanish Atlantic World, 1765-1817,” Slavery & Abolition 31, no. 2 (June 2010): 181-207
“Bishop Martínez Compañón’s Practical Utopia in Enlightenment Peru,” The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History 64, no. 3 (January 2008): 377-408