I am a social and cultural historian writing transnational and comparative history. I am a Full Professor of History at the historically black Howard University in Washington DC, United States. I was trained in Brazil, Canada, and France with a PhD in History and Social and Historical Anthropology (2007), a PhD in Art History (2004), an MA in History (1998), and a BA in Visual Arts (1995).
My work explores the history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade and their present-day legacies, including the long history of calls for reparations for slavery and colonialism, as well as the memory, heritage, material, and visual culture of slavery. I write, speak, and publish in English, Portuguese, French, and Spanish and my work has been translated into German, Dutch, Spanish, French, and Norwegian.
My scholarship has been recognized in several ways, both nationally and internationally.
In 2025, I was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and was one of the eight scholars in the United States to receive the inaugural ACLS HBCU fellowship in 2024 to work on my book The Power of Art: The World Black Artists Made in the Americas (under contract with Cambridge University Press).
In 2023, I was a Getty Residential Senior Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, CA. In 2022, I was a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute of Advanced Study (funding provided by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation), Princeton, NJ. Moreoever, I was awarded the Senior Heinz Heinen Fellowship at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at Universitat Bonn (Bonn, Germany) in 2025, and a Clark Art Fellowship at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts in 2026.
In 2023, the Carnegie Corporation New York named me “Great Immigrant, Great American,” an annual list honoring the contribution of US naturalized citizens to democracy and America.
I published over fifteen books.
Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery in the Americas (University of Chicago Press, 2024) is a hemispheric and narrative history of slavery in the Americas. A trade academic book intended for general readers, Humans in Shackles places Brazil (the country that imported the largest number of enslaved Africans in the Americas), the African continent, slave resistance, and enslaved women at the center of this painful history.
The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2024) explores how European-made luxury artifacts, including objects that incorporate formal and symbolic elements found in West African and West Central African artifacts, shaped the interactions between Africans and Europeans during the era of the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism. The book follows the trajectory of a ceremonial sword given by a French ship captain to a local agent of the Kingdom of Ngoyo on the Loango coast, which later was found in Dahomey, from where it was looted by the French troops at the end of the nineteenth century.
My book Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History was published with Bloomsbury in November 2023, this is a second revised and expanded edition of the book originally published in 2017. Its French translation was published as Réparations: Combats pour la mémoire de l’esclavage (XVIIIe-XXIe siècle) with Éditions du Seuil in 2025.
Since 2017, I have been a member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO “Routes of Enslaved Peoples” Project (former Slave Route Project). I am also a member of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History Scholarly Advisory Board and an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, London, UK. In 2019, I was a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris VIII, France, and in 2023, a visiting fellow at the Museum of World Cultures (former Tropenmuseum) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Among others, I serve on the editorial boards of the Slavery and Abolition and African Economic History, and on the advisory board of the Memory Studies Association. I also served on the Board of Editors of the American Historical Review, the flagship journal of the American Historical Association (2019-2023), on the Executive Committee of the Brazilian Studies Association (2016-2020), and on the Executive Board of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (2019-2022).
I have lectured about the history of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, France, England, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, and South Africa. I authored or edited over fifteen books. My other recent books include Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Museums and Atlantic Slavery (Museums in Focus series) published by Routledge in April 2021.
Public engagement is an important dimension of my work. My opinion articles and reviews in English and Portuguese appeared in Slate, the Washington Post, Times, Africa is a Country, Newsweek, The Conversation, History News Network, African Arguments, Intercept Brasil, Setenta e Quatro, and the Brazilian magazine Ciência Hoje. My work has been featured in several media outlets in the United States, Britain, Portugal, Canada, Brazil, Spain, France, and the Netherlands.
In 2023, I created the #Slaveryarchive Digital Initiative. Based on its own social media accounts on X, Instagram, and YouTube, the #Slaveryarchive Digital Initiative is intended to educate the public about the history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade and promote scholarship in this field via book talks on video, a podcast, book reviews, syllabi, and the #Slaveryarchive Book Prize.
My curriculum vitae is available here