Writing
This section is still taking shape. I’m gradually gathering writing, research, and other work here.
My research has focused on the history of race, popular culture, and everyday life in Brazil, particularly in Pernambuco. I’m interested in the places where culture and power meet: who gets to define what is “popular,” what counts as “authentic,” and how people at different positions in a social hierarchy use culture to negotiate authority, identity, and belonging.
Surrendering to the Streets
Black Artists of Laughter, Anger, & Reverence in Recife, Brazil, 1940–1980
Book manuscript
My book manuscript examines a world of popular performance in northeastern Brazil in which the legacies of slavery could be simultaneously painful, comic, violent, and sacred.
Poor and nonwhite performers drew on humor, exaggeration, insult, parody, religious imagery, and street performance to make sense of the social world around them. In mamulengo, bumba-meu-boi, and maracatu, references to the plantation, the “big house,” slavery, race, gender, and authority became material for performance—and, in the process, a way of thinking about power.
I approach these performances as a kind of ludic counter-archive: sources that reveal how people who left relatively little written documentation understood the institutions and hierarchies that shaped their lives.
Pernambuco, Brazil
My doctoral research began in Recife with a question about the relationship between the city's literate cultural elite and its largely nonwhite popular classes. I became increasingly interested in the struggle over who could speak for Pernambuco—and who could decide which cultural practices represented an “authentic” Pernambuco.
Fieldwork complicated that picture. What appeared to be a story centered on Recife was also a story about the interior of the state, whose cultural practices came to play an outsized role in defining Pernambucan identity. The resulting project follows the dialogue—and sometimes the conflict—between coast and interior, elite and popular, written culture and performance.
“History in Images”
During my dissertation research, I also experimented with ways of using visual and material sources to provoke historical memory.
Working with collections at the Fundação Joaquim Nabuco in Recife, I created a short film using photographs, artworks, museum objects, film, and music from the archive. I used the film as a “footstool companion” during oral-history interviews, showing it to research participants and using their responses to open conversations about memory, culture, and political change.
The project was an experiment in treating images not simply as illustrations of the historical record, but as prompts through which people could remember, interpret, and sometimes reconsider their own pasts.
Other Work
I have also written and worked on projects concerning Brazilian history, higher education, public humanities, and the relationship between scholarship and public life.
More to come.