CONFERENCE SPEAKERS
​Cassia Roth is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow (funded by the European Union) at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. She is working on a book manuscript entitled “Birthing Abolition: Reproduction and the Gradual End of Slavery in Brazil. The project explores the manner in which enslaved women’s reproductive practices informed the gradual abolition of slavery in the middle to large slave holdings of Rio de Janeiro state from 1850 (the definitive end of the country’s slave trade) to final abolition in 1888. Like most Atlantic slave societies, the Brazilian slave population was reproduced through imports and not natural growth, with a few regional and temporal exceptions. For 19th-century Rio de Janeiro state, historians have argued that harsh labour regimes, disease, and sex imbalances caused negative growth. For the US and Caribbean, however, feminist historians have approached negative growth both from the viewpoint of harsh labour regimes and disease and through the lens of “reproductive resistance”, or the enslaved practices of abortion, infanticide, and contraception as purposeful attacks on the institution of slavery. But for Brazil, scholars have dismissed the quantitative impact of the enslaved practices of fertility control on the population’s growth. Enslaved women’s fertility control may not have caused the negative growth of the enslaved population in 19th-century Rio de Janeiro. However, this project hypothesizes that enslaved women’s fertility control practices played an important symbolic role in how elites understood and approached slavery itself.
Charlton Yingling is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Louisville. In 2016 he received his Ph.D. in History from the University of South Carolina. He completed an M.A. in Latin American Studies from Vanderbilt University in 2009 and a B.A. in History from Marshall University in 2006. He has conducted research in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Spain, the Vatican, the United Kingdom, and the United States. His articles appear in History Workshop Journal, Early American Studies, Atlantic Studies, and Sociales. Free Communities of Color and the Revolutionary Caribbean, a book that he co-edited, will be published by Routledge in 2018. He has contributed to the Oxford Bibliographies in Latin American Studies, the Oxford Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography, the Oxford African American National Biography Project, the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World. Dr. Yingling's work has been funded by the Ministry of Culture and Education of Spain, the Conference on Latin American History, the Bilinski Foundation, the Academy of American Franciscan History, the Harvard University Atlantic History Seminar, and the John Carter Brown Library, among others.
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Debra Blumenthal is an historian of late medieval Iberia at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her book, Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia (Cornell University Press, 2009) explores the lives of Muslim, Greek, Russian, Tatar, Circassian and black African slaves in the port of Valencia at a key moment of transition from a Mediterranean to an Atlantic-centered slave trade. It exploits the remarkably rich civil and criminal court records that have been preserved in the archives of Valencia, in particular the demandes de llibertat filed by slaves petitioning for their freedom on a variety of legal grounds. It was awarded the Premio del Rey by the American Historical Association in 2010. Currently, she is at work on a new book-length project, Comares: Wetnurses, Midwives and the Construction of Motherhood in Late Medieval Spain.
Elciene Azevedo is Adjunct Professor of Theory and Methodology of History at the State University of Feira de Santana (UEFS - Ba), since 2010. She holds a degree in History (1994), a master's degree (1997) and a Ph.D. (2003) in Social History from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). She did a postdoctoral project at CECULT (Center for Research in the Social History of Culture - UNICAMP) from 2004 to 2006 and worked as a PRODOC / CAPES fellow, linked to the Post-Graduate Program in History of the Federal University of Bahia (UFBa) from 2008 to 2010. Dr. Azevedo has experience in the areas of History of Brazil and Theory and Methodology of History Research, developing research on the following topics: slavery and abolitionist movement, history of law and legal struggles, experience of slave and free workers in the process of abolition.
Evelyne Laurent-Perrault is an assistant professor in the History department at the University of California Santa Barbara. She has received her PhD from the University of New York. She is also a graduate in Biology from the Central University of Venezuela.
Dr. Laurent-Perrault is the founder of the Arturo Schomburg Annual Symposium that has been held for more than twenty years in the Taller Puertorriqueño, in Philadelphia (USA). She has received several scholarships, including the one awarded by the Ford Foundation, the Margaret Brown grant for research on the history of women and a Post-doctoral scholarship of the Research Institute of the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean ( IRADAC), attached to the University of Graduate Studies of the City of New York (CUNY Graduate Center). Dr. Laurent-Perrault’s research focuses on the subjectivities of enslaved people and free afro-descendants during the colonial period as well as on their intellectual contributions to the political debates of the end of the colonial period.
Fernanda Bretones is an historian of Afro-Latin America, with a particular focus on the Spanish Caribbean. She has a B.A. in History from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (Brazil), and a Master’s in Social History from the Univesity of São Paulo (Brazil). Her research has received funding from different institutions, including FAPESP (Fundação de Auxílio à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo, for the Master’s thesis), the Tinker Foundation, the Conference on Latin American History, Lapidus-Omohundro, and Vanderbilt University, among others. She is currently a PhD candidate at Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN, USA).
Fernanda Pinheiro holds a PhD in Social History from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp). She is Adjunct Professor A of the Institute of Humanities and Letters of the University of International Integration of Afro-Brazilian Lusophony (Unilab). Dr. Pinheiro’s research focuses on subjects related to slavery in the Iberian world, namely the dayly instability of the freedom of the freed and free of color people. Currently, she coordinates the research project entitled "Between Slavery and Freedom: Indians on the Western Frontier of Portuguese America", funded by CNPq (National Council for Scientific and Technological Development). This research concentrates on the exploitation of indigenous labor, its different working arrangements and its legal status.
Hebe Mattos is Professor at Universidade Federal Fluminense. Her research is about the construction of slavery and race in Brazil through the analysis of selected personal narratives. The range of narratives extends from seventeenth–century letters of Henrique Dias, a black soldier in the war against the Dutch, to contemporary oral–history life narratives of the political leadership of the Brazilian new quilombos. In collaboration with Martha Abreu, her work has resulted in the production of four documentary films, joined in a DVD collection called Present Pasts,www.labhoi.uff.br/passadospresentes. The audiovisual interviews are open to public consultation at the Acervo UFF Petrobras Cultural Memória e Música Negra at LABHOI/UFF, www.labhoi.uff.br/acervo.
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Isabela Fraga (University of Chicago) Her project explores different conceptions of individuality, autonomy and slave subjectivity in medical-scientific discourses on slavery and race, produced during 18th and 19th centuries Brazil and Caribbean.
Ivana Stoltze Lima. In the last 15 years, she has devoted herself to different research projects which intend to bring the linguistic dimension into the reflection on Brazil’s social history. Her most solid experience is concerned with 19th-century-Brazil, about which she published Cores, marcas e falas. Sentidos de mestiçagem no Império (Rio de Janeiro, Arquivo Nacional, 2003), as well as articles and book chapters. Based on interdisciplinary seminars, Dr. Lima has organized two books, História Social da Língua Nacional (2008) and História Social da Língua Nacional 2: Diáspora Africana (2014). Currently, Dr. Lima is developing the project “Knowledge, record and use of African languages in Brazil: the language from Angola and the Mina language”, supported by the CPNq.
James Fujitani (Associate Professor, Azusa Pacific University) studies Early Modern relations between Europe and East Asia. In 2016, he published an article on the 1517 Portuguese Embassy to Ming China, in the Journal of World History. He also published an article on the sixteenth-century Jesuit mission to Japan, in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History. At this time, his chief project is a monograph on the afore-mentioned Portuguese embassy and the reasons for its failure. He is also finishing an article on the first Western hospital in Japan, founded in 1557.
Jesus Tellez is a member of the project CORPI developed at the Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales del CSIC, which principal investigator is Mercedes García-Arenal. Within the scope of this project, he is writing a doctoral dissertation under the coordination of James Amelang (UAM) and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano (CCHS-CSIC) on the representation of black people in the visual arts of Modern Spain, analysing the significance and characterization of all sorts of characters: Balthasar in the Epiphany, slaves and servants, portraits, allegories, saints, etc... A part of his investigation is focused on black confraternities in Modern Spain and the depiction of black saints. The attached text is related to this aspect of the dissertation I am working on. I expect this might be of interest to you.
Joana Serrado studied Philosophy, Dutch in Coimbra, Berlin and Porto and defended her Phd in Theology and Religion at the Univ. in Groningen. Before being a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Porto, she was the Gordon Milburn JRF in Mysticism in Theology (2013-2017) and a Visiting Lecturer at the Margaret Beaufort Institute for Catholic Theology at the University of Cambridge (2016). Her publications focus on medieval and early modern Christian mysticism and history of ideas.
​Juliana Farias is Assistant Professor at Universidade da Integração Internacional da Lusofonia Afro-brasileira (UNILAB) – Malês/Bahia-Brazil Campus. Currently, she is developing a research project entitled “Among signares and nharas: Gender, slavery, and freedom in Senegambia (1750-1880)”, where she continue my studies on African women, gender, commerce and slavery. In this project, Dr. Farias seeks to understand, not only the meanings that captivity and freedom had for the great African female dealers on the Western coast, as well as to look into the daily relationships and conflicts between these women and their prisoners. Based on a comparative approach, she has been trying to explain the similarities and differences between their life trajectories, mainly in their quality as “slave-trading women”, in different times and places in the then called Senegambia, a region in the African continent where the presence of different European nations was already felt, between 1750 and 1880. In that path, and by reducing the analysis scale, Dr. Faria favours the towns of Saint-Louis and Gorée, both French-colonised areas, in today’s Senegal, and the municipalities of Bissau and Cacheu, in the territories known as Portuguese Guinea. Despite the convergences that may be noted between signares and nharas in these regions, the diverse contexts in which they lived and acted, with specifically colonial disputes and occupations, have been essential to understand the trade and slavery dynamics in which they were involved.
Leo J. Garofalo is Associate Professor of History and former Director of the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Connecticut College. A.B. from Brown and Ph.D. from Wisconsin. He researches market and ritual activities in multi-ethnic Andean cities and black Europeans’ seafaring and soldiering. To treat these themes, he co-edited Documenting Latin America: Gender, Race, and Empire (2010), Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550-1812 (2009, 2015), and Mas allá de la dominación y la resistencia (2006). He just completed a book manuscript: Drinking, Divines, and Markets: Marking Race and Ethnicity in Colonial Peru. In Peru and at the John Carter Brown Library, he has been researching enslaved “indios chinos” in 16th- and 17th-century Peru and Spain. As a Humanities Institute Fellow at the University of Connecticut, he worked on a book, “Forging a Place in the Spanish Empire: Black European Sailors, Soldiers, and Traders to the Americas”
Lisa Surwillo is a scholar of Spanish literature at Stanford University, where she is Associate Professor and Department Director.
Her research interests are grounded in the nineteenth-century Spanish empire and include the question of personhood, as expressed in the period-defining questions of intellectual property and abolition (the subjects of my first two books). Her current project is a study of two dozen freedom suits authored by enslaved women in Cuba during the First Spanish Republic. In literary terms, she will examine the composition of these complex texts that expressed a version of the enslaved's life that keenly responded to the expectations of a Spanish Republican readership. In political and legal terms, her argument will demonstrate that these powerfully moving petitions (sent to the President in Madrid) influenced metropolitan ideas of Republicanism.
Lisa Voigt is a Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at The Ohio State University, where she focuses on the literatures and cultures of colonial Latin America, the Spanish and Portuguese empires, and the early modern Atlantic world. This proposal is related to her second book, Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns (University of Texas Press, 2016). She hopes to expand the argument proposed in one of her chapters about the the Irmandade do Rosário’s sponsorship of the Triunfo Eucharístico’s publication by contextualizing it with other brotherhood documents and festival participation. Her next book project also focuses on festivals and is tentatively entitled “Performing Global Cultures in Early Modern Portugal,” which she began to research while on Fulbright, FLAD, and Gulbenkian fellowships in Lisbon in 2015-16. She is also working on a collaborative book project with Elio Brancaforte (Tulane) and Stephanie Leitch (Florida State University) about copied illustrations in early modern European travel narratives.
Magdalena Candioti is a researcher at CONICET-UBA, Inst. Ravignani, Argentina. Her current research project, “Slavery and abolition in Buenos Aires and Santa Fe. Compared perspectives on the erosion process of the slave-supporting institution during the first republican decades (1810-1853)”, seeks to understand the process of discredit, erosion and abolition of slavery in the post-colonial La Plata River, by combining the analysis of the changes in the social and “moral sensitivity” of the elites and of the enslaved towards that institution, concerning the changes in the practices of slavery, resistance and quest for freedom unfolded by several people in the provinces of Buenos Aires and Santa Fe. Among its main research lines, we are investigating the spread of laws, regulations and reflections on slavery and its purpose; we will reflect on its logics and points of view of slaves, Africans and free people of African ascent and we are investigating the struggles of the enslaved in several domains (such as justice, where we investigate freedom requests, lawsuits for abuse, selling letter, illegal slavery, re-slavery, requests for fair price, etc.) We are also analysing strategies, such as buying freedoms and setting up negotiations to gain free manumissions (of several types). Finally, more risky, but in a way more immediate strategies are pursued, such as the incorporation in armies (an option available to males).
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Marta Macedo is, since August 2017, postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, affiliated with the ERC Project COLOUR (The colour of labour: racialized lives of migrants), coordinated by Cristiana Bastos. Her current research project focuses on the relation between techno-scientific practices and the construction of the European colonial projects during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More specifically this work deals with the circulation of coffee and cocoa plantation systems (Brazil, São Tomé, Belgium Congo and Cameroon), mixing approaches from history of science and technology, race and labor history, history of capitalism and global history.
Michel Kabalan was born in Zahleh (Lebanon), 1980. He graduated from AUB in 2002 with a BS in Biology and in 2006 with an MA in Philosophy (thesis entitled: A Critique of Cultural Essentialism in Contemporary Arab Thought). His main focus was the study of contemporary Arab thinkers from Taha Hussein to Mohammad Abed Al-Jabiri along with Analytical philosophy. He worked as assistant to the director of the Anis Makdisi Program in Literature (AMPL) at AUB in the academic year 2004/2005 and he was a regular contributor to the Lebanese daily Al-Nahar between 2001 and
2006. Since 2010, he is writing his doctoral thesis on Butrus al-Bustani’s “Da’irat al-Maaref” in the department of Near Eastern Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. In 2011, he became an integrated researcher at SMELPS (Seminário Medieval de Literatura, Pensamento e Sociedade) and at the Instituto de Filosofia Universidade do Porto, Portugal where he lectures the seminars “Medieval Arabic Philosophy” and “Contemporary Arab Philosophy”. He is fluent in Arabic, French, English, Portuguese and German.
Miguel A. Valerio (Washington University in St. Louis). His dissertation focused on how sub-Saharan Africans and their descendants formed religious confraternities and participated in public festivals in the early modern Iberian Atlantic from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, concentrating on the urban centers of Seville, Barcelona, Valencia, Madrid, Lisbon, Mexico City, and Bahia, Brazil. Through the analysis of lesser-known texts and archival documents written in Spanish and Portuguese, as well as Latin, Catalan, and Valencian, he argued that through these corporations and festival performances, Blacks preserved and adapted their African cultural heritage in diaspora, garnering and exercising cultural agency, and more importantly, forging their own narratives and performance of identity and citizenship. His next research project will focus on funerary practices among black confraternities in the early modern Iberian Atlantic. The project will cover a broader geographic and temporal expanse than the dissertation and will make the first forays into this aspect of Afro-Iberian culture, that, like most black culture, has received very little scholarly attention. By focusing on confraternal mortuary practices and highlighting how these corporations functioned as kinship networks he will expand on the varied strategies Afro-Iberians employed to forge their own narratives and perform identity and citizenship.
Nick Rinehart holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the Harvard College (2014). He is a PhD candidate in English, Secondary Field in African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He has published as a co-editor American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler. Ed. Wai Chee Dimock, with Jordan Brower, Edgar Garcia, Kyle Hutzler, New York: Columbia UP. He is also the author of several refereed articles and book chapters, such as “Native Sons; or, How ‘Bigger’ Was Born Again,” Journal of American Studies (forthcoming) and “The Man That was a Thing: Reconsidering Human Commodification in Slavery.” Journal of Social History: Societies & Cultures, 50(1): 28-50 (2016).
Nuno Monteiro is Researcher and Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. Visiting professor at universities in France, Spain and Brazil, he has conducted around two hundred presentations and conferences in different countries. He coordinated several international research projects, among witch Political communication in Portuguese intercontinental monarchy (1580-1808): Kingdom, Atlantic and Brazil (2010-2013), published as Um reino e as suas repúblicas no Atlântico (Rio de Janeiro, 2017). He has published more than one hundred and fifty titles, including co-authorship of best-seller History of Portugal (8ªed., 2017), coordination of volume 2 of The History of Private Life in Portugal (2011), and co-editing of Poder y movilidad social en la Península Ibérica (siglos XV-XIX) (Madrid, 2006).
Patricia Souza de Faria is Associate Professor at the Department of History and International Relations and of the Post-graduation programme in History at the UFRRJ. Her main research topics are: Portuguese Asian Empire, the Catholic missions and the Inquisition in the early modern period. During the past years, she has worked on the two projects: "Cristãos da terra nas malhas do Santo Ofício: disciplinamento, heterodoxias e mobilidades culturais no Oriente” and “Cativos asiáticos nas malhas do Santo Ofício: disciplinamento, hierarquias e mobilidades culturais entre Portugal e o Oriente (séc. XVI-XVII)”. In 2015 and 2016, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Universidade de Évora (CAPES fellowship) and a researcher at the Centre des Recherches Historiques (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales). Her current research interests are focused on the circulation of slaves in the Asian Portuguese Empire, with a particular attention of the slaves arriving to Portugal from the Indic and Pacific. She aims at understanding the everyday life, feelings and religious beliefs of the mentioned slaves. http://lattes.cnpq.br/5859614423162912
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Patricia Valim holds a Masters’ degree in Social History (2007) and a PhD in Economic History (2013), both from the Universidade de São Paulo. She has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the UFBA, thanks to a CAPES/PNPD fellowship (2013-2015). She has taught for eight years in the degrees of History, Pedagogy and Social Service at private IES in São Paulo. Currently, she is adjunct professor II of Colonial Brazil History at the Department of History, Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA). She has focused her interests mainly in the History of Bahia; production, circulation and consumption in colonial Brazil; insurgent conjectures and political culture in colonial Brazil; colonial administration; Bahia’s conjure of 1798; and fights over the political independence of Bahia. She is doing her research on the weight of regional political identities deeply marked by the asymmetries of slavery that organized the living in a colony, and as such created the general conditions of the new political order that projected itself in several revolts during the Ancient Regime and in the fights for the independence of Brazil that took place in Bahia, especially during the Revolta dos Periquitos, in 1824.
Robson Pedrosa Costa finished his PhD in 2013 at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (Brazil). In his dissertation he presented the results of his research on slaves who belonged to the Order of Saint Benedict in Pernambuco. Among his main conclusions, he highlighted the presence of slave owners in the four rural properties from this Order. Currently, he has been gathering unpublished sources on how the Benedictine Engenho’s word in the 19th century, in order to have a better understanding of the dynamics of rural workers who participated as suppliers of sugar cane to the Monastery. He has found many nominal lists that show the participation of free farmers, freedmen and even slaves from the Olinda’s monastery. These and other documents show the impossibility of understanding the internal dynamics of these properties based on the old polarization “free work”/”slave work”, as the two forces were not part of a same paternalist manorial universe.
Rômulo da Silva Ehalt (University Keio, Tokyo, Japan) has finished his PhD in March 2018, with the dissertation “Jesuits and the Problem of Slavery in Early Modern Japan) on the theological and political arguments used by the missionary Jesuits to justify the enslavement of Japanese and Korean populations in the 16th and 17th centuries. His research interests are centered on the history of Jesuits and enslavement in Asia, with a special emphasis on the history of moral theology and catholic casuistic of the Christianism as political ideology in the 16th and 17th centuries. Currently, he is preparing a project dealing with the theological and political arguments used to justify the enslavement of Chinese people in Macau during the same period. He is also interested in the library of the Saint Paul’s College in Goa in the 16th century; and the study of classic Roman elements as political allegories in the commemorative procession in the canonization of Loyola and Xavier in Porto, in 1622. He has recently submitted an article in which he suggests the analysis of multiple definitions of enslavement coexisting in the Philippine’s colonial society; a study on the proposed invasion of Ceylon using Japanese and Abyssinian Christians, sent to the king in 1632; and an article analyzing the decrees of the First Provincial Council in Goa, in 1567 and its relation with the Asian enslavement.
Sébastien Rozeaux (Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès, FRAMESPA) is adjunct professor of early modern and modern history at the Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès and member of the FRAMESPA lab. In 2012 he defended his PhD dissertation, titled A Génese de um “Grande Monumento Nacional”: Literatura e Meio Literário no Brasil no Período Imperial (1822-1880)”. The topic of the slavery and the slaves has been approached in his dissertation and in some publications such as - « L’identité refoulée ? Les écrivains d’origine métisse au temps du Brésil impérial (1822-1889) », in S. Capanema, Q. Deluermoz, M. Molin, M. Redon (dir.), Du transfert culturel au métissage. Concepts, acteurs, pratiques. Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, coll. Histoire, 2015, p. 297-313; «Les horizons troubles de la politique de « colonisation » au Brésil : réflexions sur l’identité de la nation brésilienne à travers le prisme de la question migratoire (1850-1889) », Espace populations sociétés [En ligne], 2014/2-3 | 2015, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2014, consulté le 06 février 2015. URL : http://eps.revues.org/5743; and «Être femme de lettres au Brésil à l’époque impériale (1822-1889) : le statut social d’une ‘minorité’ porteuse d’une voix dissonante dans l’espace public », Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos [Online].
Silvia Hunold Lara (Unicamp, Brazil) studies the history of slavery in Brazil during the 17th and 18th centuries. She has observed the relations between landlords and slaves in a sugar region during the second half of the 18th century (in Campos de Violência, Rio de Janeiro, Paz e Terra, 1988) and the connections between slavery, culture and politics in the 18th century Portuguese America (Fragmentos setecentistas. São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2007). She has worked on topics of social history of law during this same period, having organized a commented edition of Ordenações Filipinas, livro V (São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1999) and a repertory of the Legislação sobre Escravos Africanos na América Portuguesa (published in José Andrés-Gallego, coord. Nuevas Aportaciones a la Historia Jurídica de Iberoamérica, Madrid, 2000, Cd-Rom). In the present time, she is finishing a book on the history of Palmares, the largest and longest settlement in the history of Brazil of slaves who managed to escape. At the same time, she has been studying the processes of enslavement of the Africans in the context of the Atlantic traffic in the region of Angola during the 17th century.
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​Sophia Blea Nuñez's research interests include reading culture and book history, medieval and Golden-Age literature, gender and sexuality studies, the Inquisition, race, and representations of moriscos and conversos. In her dissertation, Bodies and Books in the Early Modern Hispanic World, she examines the conceptual and practical links between books – cuerpos de libros – and human bodies, which she argue are deeper and more significant than is generally acknowledged. By studying the frequent metaphors of books as bodies, ideals and practices of libraries, and writings about human bodies, she seeks to illuminate book culture and the struggles to construct identity, particularly minority identities, as legible on the body. This presentation connects to her third chapter, where she discusses the foibles of reading and writing the ambiguous body and how concepts of racial and religious difference invoked culturally-specific notions of gender. The chapter centers on the “lieutenant nun” Catalina/Antonio de Erauso and the mixed-race former slave-turned-surgeon Elena/o de Céspedes.
Thomas Mareite is a PhD candidate at Leiden University. His research focuses on slavery, abolition and slave resistance in Latin America (especially in Chile and Mexico) in the 18th and 19th centuries. He currently writes a dissertation on escaped slaves from the US South settling across the Mexican border between 1800 and 1860.
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Ynaê Santos has a PhD in History from the Universidade de São Paulo and is assistant professor at the CPDOC-FGV (Brazil). She is a specialist in urban slavery in the Americas. Her PhD research, Irmãs do Atlântico: escravidão e espaço urbano no Rio de Janeiro e em Havana (1763-1844) aimed at analyzing how the largest slavery cities in the Americas were able to articulate the need of slave labor with the vicissitudes of the everyday life. The dissertation raised many issues, including in subjects such as the (re)definitions of slave identities in the urban spaces, especially marked by an increased autonomy in the transit of the captives. Other subjects of interest are a) slavery and artistic production in Rio de Janeiro during the colonial period (following the life of Mestre Valentim); b) memory of the historiography of slavery in Brazil and in the Americas; c) madness and slavery; d) production of materials on slavery in the Americas for schools and/or a wider audience. For further information, please check: http://buscatextual.cnpq.br/buscatextual/visualizacv.do?id=K4704398P6
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