PhD Candidate
Latin America and the Caribbean
My dissertation is a history of Portuguese notions of different enslaved populations’ ‘capacities to work.’ I show how, throughout the history of colonial Brazil, settlers, missionaries, and colonial officials debated the differences in the skills, capacities, and proclivities among the various populations subjected to enslavement. These conversations essentialized these populations by placing them in hierarchies of “capacities to work”, generally favoring African over indigenous workers, Angolan slaves over West Africans one. However, when faced with new economic contexts and new empirical realities, these discourses had to be translated and reconceptualized. My dissertation traces how these discourses developed, unpacking to what extent they responded to skilled practices of indigenous and African peoples witnessed on-the-ground. I show how these discourses worked and evolved on-the-ground in the Brazilian Northeast and the Amazon in the 16th and 17th centuries. I work with sources in Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch.
Outside research, I am one of the co-directors of Beyond Academia, a Berkeley non-profit dedicated to helping graduate students learn about careers outside the professoriate. I also work as a consultant at Berkeley Innovative Solutions, a graduate-student consulting program focused on sustainability projects.
Research Interests
- Slavery and Unfree Labor
- Race and Racial Thinking
- Political Economy
- Environmental History
Prizes and Awards
Bancroft Library Meylan Fellowship, University of California, Berkeley, 2023-2024
Visiting Guest, Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt am Main, 2023
Doctoral Completion Fellowship, University of California, Berkeley, 2023
Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award, Spring & Fall 2022
Global, International and Area Studies John L. Simpson ABD Fellowship, University of California, Berkeley, 2021
FLAS Academic Year Award (Dutch), University of California, Berkeley, 2019
IIS Pre-Dissertation Summer Research Grant, University of California, Berkeley, 2019
CLAS Summer Field Research Award, University of California, Berkeley, 2019
Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, University of California, Berkeley, 2019
Graduate Dean’s Summer Research Grant, University of California, Berkeley, 2018
Laidlaw Undergraduate Research Scholarship, University of St Andrews, 2016
University Scholarship for Research and Leadership, University of St Andrews, 2016
