Chad Black is a specialist in the late-colonial and early-Republican Andean region, with a special emphasis on the connections between law, governance, and gendered social authority.  Among his specific areas of research are women’s uses of customary legal practices to assert social and economic autonomy, the impact of the independence period on social relations, and the conflict between institutional and popular norms of sexual behaviors. 

In addition to the history of gender and sexuality, Black is working on the early history of the bicycle, sport, and physical culture in nineteenth-century Latin America.

Chad teaches courses at the University of Tennessee on a wide variety of subjects related to both early and modern Latin America, including Gender and Sexuality in Early Spanish America, The Conquest of Spanish America, the History of Indigenous Peoples in Latin America, Latin American History through Film, Social History of the Bicycle, and the History of Latin American Sport.

Research Interests

Early Latin America, gender and sexuality, Ecuador, legal history, historiography, empire, digital history, 18th and 19th-century Andes, Latin American sport, history of the bicycle.