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Biography
My entry into academic life has been somewhat non-traditional. My interest in all things Latin American sprang from time spent in California in my twenties, where I first learned Spanish at night school in San Francisco. That was followed by a stint of travel in Mexico and Guatemala, before returning to the UK to live in London where I managed (eventually) to land myself a job with an airline that gave me the benefits of cheap travel, while establishing a circle of friends that were mostly Spanish-speaking. I continued to make trips on and off to Latin America, but the airline job came to an end meaning I had to find a different way of financing my interest in Latin America. So I took one of the last opportunities there was to get a mature student grant and ventured up the University of Liverpool to study a BA in Latin American Studies at the Institute of Latin American Studies. It was there (and on the year abroad spent in Brazil) that I learned Portuguese. I graduated with a first class, then somehow secured funding from what was then the British Academy for an MA in Comparative Literature at the University of Manchester, followed up with British Academy funding for a PhD back at ILAS, Liverpool. My PhD examined manumission, criminality, and slavery in nineteenth-century Bahia. I was supervised first by Prof. Rory Miller (Economic History) at Liverpool then, upon taking up my current post in 1998, by Prof Dick Geary (History) and Prof Toni Kapcia (SPLAS) at Nottingham as a staff PhD.
Expertise Summary
I research and teach on colonial, imperial and modern Brazilian history and society. My main areas of expertise fall within the scope of slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil, and especially Salvador da Bahia. Thematically, my research has focused on enslaved motherhood and reproductive slavery, processes of manumission, and children in the slave trade and slavery. I have also published on the abolitionist writings of Maria Firmina dos Reis, and on the military dictatorship in twentieth-century Brazil.
Teaching Summary
My teaching covers the history and culture of Brazil mostly from the late colonial period to the present day. This includes a a first year survey course of modern Brazilian history, a second year… read more
Research Summary
My recent monograph focused on enslaved motherhood, and included chapters on children in the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved childhood and childhood manumissions in nineteenth-century Bahia,… read more
My teaching covers the history and culture of Brazil mostly from the late colonial period to the present day. This includes a a first year survey course of modern Brazilian history, a second year module on Black Brazilian abolitionism and Black Public Life, and final year module on Brazilian Slave Society, designed for students with or without Portuguese language skills.
Current Research
My recent monograph focused on enslaved motherhood, and included chapters on children in the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved childhood and childhood manumissions in nineteenth-century Bahia, Brazil. It is this area of historical research that I am now working on more closely.
Past Research
My research focus has been mostly historical and based in the archives of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. Within this context, I have researched and published on themes of gender, race, and slavery during the nineteenth century. Themes examined related mainly to African women and their descendants, in enslavement and freedom and include: infanticide, slave resistance, criminality, creolization, manumission, miscegenation, mobility, modalities of family formation and patterns of accumulation.
Other research projects include nineteenth-century Black abolitionism in Brazil; Anglo-Brazilian relations during military rule in the twentieth century; and history of police and state violence in Brazil.