Fields:
Latin American History
Atlantic History
Teaching:
History of Brazil
Modern Latin America
Comparative Race and Slavery
Public History
Heritage and Memory
Education & Training
- PhD, Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2000
Representative Publications
- “The Emperor and the Abolitionist: A Brazilian Royal Visits the U.S.”, Americas Quarterly, January 2020.
- “Slavery and International Relations in 19th century Brazil." In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, edited by Guillermo Palacios and Hebe Mattos. New York, Oxford University Press, 2020.
- A Black Jurist in a Slave Society: Antonio Pereira Rebouças and the Trials of Brazilian Citizenship. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019
- “Emancipación y Guerra en el Río de la Plata, 1840-1865: hacia una historia social de las relaciones internacionales.” Historia Mexicana, no. 69, vol. 2, September 2019, p. 693-742.
- “O mundo não é dos espertos: história pública, passados sensíveis, injustiças históricas”, in História da Historiografia 12 (2019): 145-176.
- With Brodwyn Fischer and Hebe Mattos. “Law, Silence, and Racialized Inequalities in the History of Afro-Brazil.” In Afro Latin American Studies: an introduction, edited by George Reid Andrews and Alejandro de la Fuente. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
- “Slavery in Brazil.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History, edited by Trevor Burnard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780199730414-0278
- With Beatriz Mamigonian. “Le crime de réduction à l'esclavage dans le Brésil du XIXe siècle.” Brésil(s). Sciences humaines et sociales, 11 (May 2017).
- “Illegal Enslavement, International Relations, and International Law on the Southern Border of Brazil.” Law and History Review, 35, no. 1 (2017).
- “The Two Enslavements of Rufina: Slavery and International Relations on the Southern Border of Nineteenth-Century Brazil.” The Hispanic American Historical Review, 96 (2016).
- With Sue Peabody. Free Soil in the Atlantic World. London: Routledge, 2014.
- With Sue Peabody. Slavery, Freedom and the Law in the Atlantic World. Boston: Bedford Books, 2007, Co-written with Sue Peabody.
- Liberata: a lei da ambiguidade – as ações de liberdade da Corte de Apelação do Rio de Janeiro no século 19. Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, 1994 (digital edition 2008).
Research Interests
I am currently working on two research projects: the book manuscript Slave Soil, Free Soil: Illegal Slave Trade, International Relations, and the Paraguayan War, a social history of slavery and international relations in South America between the 1750s and 1870s, in which I analyze slave flights, small revolts, kidnappings and illegal enslavement of free women and their children in the Southern border of the Brazilian Empire and it’s impacts on the outbreak of the Paraguayan War (1864-70); and, with Monica Lima and Fernanda Felisberto, a collection with selected documents on enslaved women in Brazil.
I am also working on two public history projects: Passados Presentes, with Hebe Mattos and Martha Abreu, an interdisciplinary digital project on the memory of slavery in Brazil; and, with Daryle Williams and Mariana Muaze, the database “Enslaved Peoples in 19th-Century Rio de Janeiro,” a series of datasets to be published on the “Enslaved Publishing Platform,” sponsored by the project Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade.