KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Professor João José dos Reis

(Universidade Federal da Bahía)

João José dos Reis has a degree in History from the Universidade Católica do Salvador (1974). Professor João José dos Reis also studied Social Sciences at the Universidade Federal da Bahia (1971-75). He obtain both his Masters (1977) and his PhD (1982) degrees in History at the University of Minnesota.
He was visiting professor at the Universities of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Princeton, Brandeis, Texas (Austin) and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He was visiting scholar at the University of London, at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford) and at the National Humanities Center (Research Triangle, NC), among others. He is full professor at the History Department of the Universidade Federal da Bahia. He was member of the History Advisory Committee of the CNPq on several occasions, a center which he integrates as Researcher 1A
Professor João José dos Reis received the Comenda do Mérito Científico from the Ministry of Science and Technology in the class of Comendador (2004) and Grã Cruz (2010) and he is a Honorary Foreign Member of the American Historical Association.

His book A morte é uma festa received the Best Book Jabuti prize in 1992, and the American Association Haring prize in 1997, among others. In 2010 he received the Robertson prize for best article in the Hispanic American Historical Review, in 2012 the Casa de las Américas prize from the Instituto Casa de las Americas (Cuba) and in 2017 the Machado de Assis prize, from the Academia Brasileira das Letras.

He is the author of several books, among which: Negociação e Conflito: A Resistência Negra no Brasil Escravista (1989), A Morte é uma Festa: Ritos Fúnebres e Revolta Popular no Brasil do Século XIX (1992), Liberdade por um Fio: História dos Quilombos no Brasil (1996); Rebelião Escrava no Brasil: a História do Levante dos Malês (1835) (2003); Domingos Sodré, um sacerdote africano: escravidão, liberdade e candomblé na Bahia do século XIX (2008).

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Professor Michelle McKinley

(University of Oregon School of Law)

Michelle McKinley is the Bernard B. Kliks Professor of Law at Law School, University of Oregon. She teaches Immigration Law and Policy, Public International Law, International Criminal Law, and Refugee & Asylum Law. Professor McKinley attended Harvard Law School, where she was Executive Editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal and graduated cum laude in 1995. Professor McKinley also holds a Masters Degree in Social Anthropology from Oxford University.

McKinley has extensively published work on public international law, Latin American legal history, and the law of slavery. Her articles appear in the Law and History Review; Slavery & Abolition; Journal of Family History, Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice; Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power; Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, and Unbound: Harvard Law Journal of the Legal Left, among others. She has been granted fellowships for her research from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Newberry Library. She was awarded the Surrency Prize in 2011 for her article, "Fractional Freedoms: Legal Activism & Ecclesiastical Courts in Colonial Lima, 1593-1700.” In 2014, she was a fellow in residence at Princeton University's Program in Law and Public Affairs, where she completed a book on enslaved women in colonial Latin America using courts to litigate their claims to liberty.

Prior to joining the academy, Professor McKinley was the former Managing Director of Cultural Survival, an advocacy and research organization dedicated to indigenous peoples. She is also the founder, and former director, of the Amazonian Peoples' Resources Initiative, a community based reproductive rights organization in Peru, where she worked for nine years as an advocate for global health and human rights.