Micaela Wiehe

Micaela is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Penn State University. Her research frames Indigenous women’s unfree labor in the Spanish Empire as a spatial and gendered system of coercion and captivity that extended across both domestic and imperial geographies. Her dissertation, The Intimate Labor of Empire: Indigenous Women, Mobility, and Unfreedom in Colonial Mexico and Spain, 1492–1600, illuminates how women experienced and navigated these structures through kinship, mobility, and legal resistance across both New Spain and Iberia. Her broader work integrates ethnohistorical methods, feminist theory, and spatial analysis to broaden our understanding of slavery and labor in colonial Mexico and Spain. She remains deeply committed to public history and civic engagement, serving as a historical consultant and content writer for FactCite–Lincoln Library Press and as a research assistant for Native Bound Unbound: Archive of Indigenous Slavery, where over thirty of her peer-reviewed transcriptions appear. Her work has been published in the Journal for Immigration and Ethnic Studies and the Oxford Bibliographies Online: Latin American Studies. The Fulbright-Hays Program, the Conference on Latin American History, the Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions, the American Historical Association, and Penn State History and College of Liberal Arts have generously supported her research. She works under the supervision of Professor Matthew Restall.

2025 Fulbright Hays-Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad
2024 Newberry Consortium in American Indian Studies Graduate Student Research Grant
2024 The Pennsylvania State University Whiting Indigenous Knowledge Research Award
2024 Susan Welch/Nagle Family Graduate Fellowship
2024 The American Historical Association Albert J. Beveridge Grant for Research in the History of the Western Hemisphere
2023 The Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) The James R. Scobie Award
2022 Latin American Studies Research and Travel Award, The Pennsylvania State University
2022-2023 History Graduate Student Association President