Professor Keila Grinberg has been awarded the 2026 Partnership of Distinction Award from Pitt's Community Engaged Scholarship Forum in recognition of her collaborative work with the Bracuí community in Brazil.
The Bracuí Community Engagement Partnership is a long-term collaboration between her public history project Passados Presentes: Memories of Slavery in Brazil and the Quilombo of Bracuí — a community of descendants of enslaved Africans located in Angra dos Reis, Rio de Janeiro. Active for more than two decades, the partnership is now anchored through Pitt's Center for Latin American Studies.
Passados Presentes maps sites of memory connected to the Atlantic slave trade across Rio de Janeiro state, working directly with quilombo communities to build permanent outdoor memorials and exhibits that honor the victims of enslavement and celebrate the Black cultural heritage their descendants have sustained. In Bracuí — one of the clandestine landing points for enslaved Africans in the nineteenth century — the project has helped the community tell its own history through signage, open-air installations, and a mobile app connecting visitors to the region's sites of memory.
The Partnership of Distinction Award recognizes community-university collaborations that demonstrate sustained mutual benefit and reciprocity. Congratulations to Professor Grinberg on this well-deserved recognition.