Marcella (Sally) Hayes is a historian of the Iberian Atlantic world. Her dissertation project centers on the legal, political, and social position of black slaves and free people of color in seventeenth-century Lima. Theoretically, two legal regimes, the república de indios and the república de españoles, governed colonial Latin America. Her research explores how slaves and their descendants fit (or did not fit) into this system, both in theory and in practice. She received her BA in History and Spanish from Cornell University in 2013 and entered the PhD program in the fall of 2014. She is a Fulbright-Hays scholar, and her work has been supported by multiple research and writing fellowships, including funding from the John Carter Brown Library and the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.