I study the history of Brazil and Latin America with special interest in race, culture, slavery, labor, and gender. While most of my previous work has focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, my most recent project is rooted in the colonial era, where I explore the afterlives and cultural, spiritual, physical, and monetary inheritances of Palmares, one of history’s largest and longest-standing fugitive slave settlements, and its iconic leader, Zumbi. The book, After Palmares: Diaspora, Inheritance, and the Afterlives of Zumbi, published in 2024 in Duke University Press's Radical Perspectives Series, builds on my longstanding interest in race and the legacies of slavery, while deepening and broadening my engagement with the history and scholarship of Africa and its diaspora.

My first book, Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil, was published by Duke University Press in 2013 and awarded Honorable Mention for the Bryce Wood Book Prize (Latin American Studies Association) and the Woody Guthrie Award (International Association for the Study of Popular Music). In 2020, I published a second book about Gilberto Gil's genre-defying album Refazenda with Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 Series.

My work has also appeared in scholarly venues such as Hispanic American Historical Review, Luso-Brazilian Review, A Contracorriente, Journal of Latin American Studies, and in edited volumes published in the U.S. and Brazil.

I believe in the value of engaged scholarship. Towards that end, I have written in venues such as New York Magazine, RebootIllinois, Notches, and Public Seminar, and have appeared on Al-Jazeera to provide commentary and news analysis about Brazil. I also prioritize exchange and collaboration with scholars in Latin America and am proud to have co-authored with Brazilian scholars several pieces, including an essay about race, gender, and monuments and an animated short about Palmares for TED-Ed.

Before coming to Illinois I was Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Latin American Studies at Wesleyan University and then Assistant Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies and Director of the Center for Brazilian Studies at Columbia University.

Students, sign up for office hours here.