Professor; Associate Director of Graduate Studies
About
I am a historian of Afro-Latin American lives, thought, and politics as they unfolded in the aftermath of slavery, particularly in Brazil and Argentina. My work explores the intersections of ideas of race and nation in Latin America, with a focus on how Afro-Latin Americans have shaped and contested the region's ideologies of racial inclusiveness in their ongoing struggles for recognition and equality.
My first book, Terms of Inclusion, charts the changing terms through which self-defined black intellectuals in three major Brazilian cities negotiated the meanings of racial inclusiveness in their multi-racial nation, and the place of people of African descent within it, between 1920 and 1980.
My co-edited volume (with Eduardo Elena, University of Miami), Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina, is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that newly places twentieth- and twenty-first century Argentina in conversation with the literature on race and nation in Latin America more broadly.
I am currently working on two projects. Black Legend: ‘El Negro’ Raúl Grigera and Racial Storytelling in Modern Argentina (under contract with Cambridge University Press' Afro-Latin America Series) reconstructs both the life story and the legends surrounding Raúl Grigera, a popular Afro-Argentine street figure from the early twentieth century. It examines the role of “racial storytelling” in constructing whiteness and blackness in post-independence Argentina and the power of such narratives to shape individual fates. I am also co-editing (with George Reid Andrews, University of Pittsburgh, and Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, University of Michigan) a volume of selected articles from the historical black presses of Latin America, annotated and translated for English-language audiences.
My teaching ranges from introductory surveys on the historical discipline or modern Latin American history to upper-level courses, taught in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, on a range of topics in Latin American history, culture and literature (Brazil’s black press, Brazil’s multi-ethnic popular culture, literatures of race and nation in Latin America, race and gender in Argentine historical fiction), as well as graduate courses on specialized topics (race and nation in Latin America, Afro-Latin-America, history and narrative, black celebrity in the South Atlantic).
Affiliations:
Romance Languages and Literatures (Spanish and Portuguese)
Fields of Study:
Latin America, 19th-21st centuries
Afro-Latin America
Brazil and Argentina
Race and nation, racial ideologies, racial politics
Black intellectuals, black press in Latin America
History and narrative
Selected Publications:
Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Brazil, University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina, (with Eduardo Elena), Cambridge University Press, 2016.
“Liberta by Trade: Negotiating the Terms of Unfree Labor in Gradual Abolition Buenos Aires (1820s-30s).” Journal of Social History [advance online version] 2018.
"El Negro Raúl: Lives and Afterlives of an Afro-Argentine Celebrity, 1886 to the Present." Hispanic American Historical Review 96:4, 2016.
“’Racial Democracy’ and Racial Inclusion: Hemispheric Histories” (with Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof). In George Reid Andrews and Alejandro de la Fuente, eds., Afro-Latin America: An Introduction. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
"Of Sentiment, Science, and Myth: Shifting Metaphors of Racial Inclusion in Twentieth-Century Brazil.” Social History 37:3, 2012.
"When Rio was Black: Soul Music, National Culture, and the Politics of Racial Comparison in 1970s Brazil.” Hispanic American Historical Review, 89:1, 2009.
Selected Awards:
James Alexander Robertson Memorial Prize, Conference on Latin American History, 2017
Warren Dean Memorial Prize, Conference on Latin American History, 2013
Roberto Reis Book Award, Brazilian Studies Association, 2012
NEH Faculty Fellowship, 2017
ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars, 2017
SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship, 2001
Matthews Underclass Teaching Award, 2017
LSA Class of 1923 Memorial Teaching Award for Outstanding Teaching of Undergraduates, University of Michigan, 2012
