AAHHE Early Career Award

Ángela Pérez-Villa (MA, PhD University of Michigan) is a historian of Latin America interested in Colombia’s legal and gender history. Prior to her post as Assistant Professor of History at Western Michigan University, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Rollins College, Florida and a Graduate Fellow at the Program in Race, Law, and History at the University of Michigan’s Law School. Most recently, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford, UK. As a recipient of distinguished national fellowships funded by the Mellon Foundation and the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, Dr. Pérez-Villa has worked to become a thriving teacher-scholar.

Her research on the social history of the law in early nineteenth-century Colombia is based on meticulous work in archives and specialized library collections in several countries. This work is expanding the way scholars understand war through gender and the law. And she’s already getting scholarly recognition with an award-winning piece in the Journal of Social History. Dr. Pérez-Villa is also a passionate teacher who cares about student success, mentorship, and teaching practices. She has received grants to redesign assignments and promote community engagement while contributing to professional pedagogy outlets like Teaching History: A Journal of Methods.

Mayra Puente, PhD
Assistant Professor
University of California, Santa Barbara

Dra. Mayra Puente, PhD is an assistant professor of higher education research in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Using critical race, spatial, and Chicana feminist theories and methods, Dra. Puente investigates rural Latinx students' college access and choice processes from migrant farm working backgrounds in rural California. During this 2024-2025 academic year, Dr. Puente received various grants, including the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, the American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a UC Santa Barbara Academic Senate Faculty Research Grant, for her interdisciplinary research in this subfield of higher education. Her commitment to higher education access, equity, and success for rural Latinx students has also been recognized by the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education (AAHHE), naming Dra. Puente a 2024-2025 AAHHE Faculty Fellow and a 2025 AAHHE Early Career Scholar. The American Association of Educational Research (AERA) has further acknowledged her research, granting her an Outstanding Publication Award in 2024 and two dissertation awards. Dra. Puente’s theoretical, methodological, and empirical commitments to rural Latinx students are motivated by her own identities and background as a proud daughter of Mexican migrant farm workers from California’s San Joaquin Valley agricultural region.