Professor of Spanish, Portuguese, and History
About
Professor Alberto’s research explores the intersections of ideologies of race and nation in Latin America and their power to shape ideas and experiences of citizenship and national belonging across the region since independence, particularly in Brazil and Argentina. Her work is broadly concerned with the ways that competing definitions of race and nation, enunciated by political and intellectual elites as well as by people of color since the nineteenth century, produced different kinds of multi-racial societies and different ideas about the meanings of racial inclusiveness across Latin America.
Professor Alberto is the author of multiple articles on issues of racial activism and racial ideologies in modern Brazil and Argentina, and of Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Brazil (UNC Press, 2011; winner of the 2013 Warren Dean Memorial Prize and co-winner of the 2012 Roberto Reis Award). 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. Alberto is also co-editor (with Eduardo Elena, University of Miami) of the edited volume Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 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. Her current book manuscript, "Black Legend: The Unexpected Story of 'El Negro Raúl' and the Untold History of Race in Argentina" reconstructs both the biography and the legends surrounding Raúl Grigera, a popular Afro-Argentine street figure from the early twentieth century, to understand the role of collective storytelling in constructions of “whiteness” and “blackness” in modern Argentina and the power of these stories to shape individual fates.
Professor Alberto’s teaching ranges from introductory surveys on the discipline of history or on modern Latin America 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).
Recent and Selected Publications
Books
Articles
- (2016) “El Negro Raúl: Lives and Afterlives of an Afro-Argentine Celebrity, 1886 to the Present.” Hispanic American Historical Review 96:4
- (2016) Quando o Rio era black: soul music no Brasil dos anos 70, Revista História, Questões & Debates 62. Special issue: Histórias do tempo presente: pensamento social e raça no Brasil (1945-2000)
- (2012) Of Sentiment, Science, and Myth, Social History
- (2012) Para africano ver:, Afro-Ásia
- (2009) When Rio was Black, Hispanic American Historical Review
- (2008) Para Africano Ver, Luso-Brazilian Review
Book Chapters
- (2016) “Introduction: The Shades of the Nation” (with Eduardo Elena), in Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina (above), 1-22.
- (2016) “Indias blancas, negros febriles: Racial Stories and History-Making in Contemporary Argentine Fiction," in Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina (above), 289-317.
- (2015) Títere roto: Vidas posibles y vidas póstumas del ‘Negro Raúl’ (1886-2011), Cartografías afrolatinoamericanas II. Perspectivas situadas desde Argentina
- (2014) “A Mãe Preta entre sentimento, ciência, e mito: Os intelectuais negros e as metáforas variáveis da inclusão racial no Brasil, 1920-1980.” In Políticas da raça entre experiências e legados da Abolição e da pós-emancipação no Brasil, ed. Flávio dos Santos Gomes and Petrônio J. Domingues São Paulo: Editora Selo Negro, 377-402.
Recent undergraduate courses taught:
Portuguese 301, Readings in Luso-Brazilian Culture: The Multi-Ethnic Roots of Brazilian Popular Culture: From Margins to Center
Spanish 430: Writing Race and Nation in Modern Latin America
Portuguese 473: The Literature of Race in Brazil: Afro-Brazilian Perspectives on Brazil's Racial Democracy
Research Areas(s)
- Modern Latin American History and Historiography
- Brazil and Argentina
- Ideologies of Race, Nation, and Citizenship
- Intellectual/Cultural History
- Afro-Latin America/Diaspora
Affiliation(s)
Award(s)
- LSA Class of 1923 Memorial Teaching Award for Outstanding Teaching of Undergraduates, University of Michigan, 2012
- Warren Dean Memorial Prize, Conference on Latin American History, 2013
- Roberto Reis Book Award, Brazilian Studies Association, 2012.
