I study the history of Brazil and Latin America with special interest in race, culture, labor, and gender.  My first book, Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil, was published by Duke University Press in 2013.  In 2014, the Latin American Studies Association awarded it Honorable Mention (runner-up) for the Bryce Wood Book Prize. 

My work has appeared in American Historical Review, Hispanic American Historical Review, Luso-Brazilian Review, A Contracorriente, Journal of Latin American Studies, and several edited volumes published in the U.S. and Brazil. I have also written for online venues, including New York Magazine, RebootIllinois, Notches, and others, and have  appeared on Al-Jazeera to provide commentary and news analysis about Brazil.

At the moment, I am working on several projects.  The first, a scholarly monograph titled "The Death of Zumbi: Suicide, Slavery, and Martyrdom in Brazil and the Black Atlantic," examines the ways that different actors have narrated the passing of a singular figure, Zumbi, the last leader of Palmares, Brazil's famed fugitive slave community. Between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, observers across the Atlantic have treated his death alternately as a suicide or a war casualty.  Within these competing narratives, we may find new ways to understand the formation of colonial and independent Brazil and the trajectories of numerous twentieth-century phenomena, including Marxist mobilizations, racial revolution, and the consolidation of multiple authoritarian administrations.

A book about Gilberto Gil's album Refazenda  is under contract with Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 Series, and I have a longer-term project about the Brazilian scholar Edison Carneiro and his father, Antônio Joaquim de Souza Carneiro, both of whom helped shaped the intertwined histories of race, radical politics, and intellectual inquiry in the century that followed abolition (1888).

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.  

I am currently teaching HIST 104 (Black Music) and LAST 170 (Intro to Latin America).