Jessica Delgado is an associate professor in the Departments of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and History. She earned her PhD in Latin American history at the University of California at Berkeley in 2009 and taught at Princeton University in the religion department from 2009-2019.

Delgado's primary areas of teaching and research are the histories of women, gender, sexuality, religion and race in Latin America — particularly in Mexico in the 16^th, 17^th and 18^th centuries. Other areas of particular interest include colonial Catholicism; gender, race, caste and religion in the early-modern Atlantic World; the materiality of devotion; the relationship between religiosity and people’s experiences of the physical world and embodiment; and the intersection between social and spiritual status.

Her first book, Troubling Devotion: Laywomen and the Church in Colonial Mexico, 1630-1770, looks at the ways laywomen’s religiosity and daily interactions with religious authorities, institutions, symbols and ideas shaped the devotional landscape of colonial Mexico. Her current book project is called The Beata of the Black Habit: Race, Sexuality, and Religious Authority in Late Colonial Mexico; it takes the life and trial of an unknown female mystic to explore changes in religious culture, colonial power and racialized ideologies of gender and sexuality in late 18^th-century Mexico.