ALARI Seminar Series with Gracyelle Costa: "Race, Eugenics and Social Policy in Brazil"

Speaker: Gracyelle Costa, Visiting Researcher, Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center
Moderated by: Sidney Chalhoub, David and Peggy Rockefeller Professor of History and of African and African American Studies; Faculty Affiliate, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures

Gracyelle Costa Ferreira is a professor in the Social Work Department at the Universidade Federal Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard University to develop her research and scholarship at Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo. Her book project focuses on Eugenics and Social Policy in Brazil during the early 20th Century. Doctor Costa Ferreira aims to understand the role of professions like Social Work, Nursing, and Nutrition in the spread of eugenics in Brazil through social policies. In 2021, she received the "Prêmio Capes Tese" Award for the best doctoral dissertation in Brazil in her field. Dr. Costa Ferreira also coordinated the working group that founded the Núcleo de Estudos Afro-Brasileiros e Indígenas (Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous Studies Center) at  Universidade Federal Rio de Janeiro in 2022.

Sidney Chalhoub taught history at the University of Campinas, Brazil, for thirty years. He moved to Harvard in July 2015. He has published three books on the social history of Rio de Janeiro: Trabalho, lar e botequim (1986), on working-class culture in the early twentieth century; Visões da liberdade (1990), on the last decades of slavery in the city; and Cidade febril (1996), on tenements and epidemics in the second half of the nineteenth century. He also published Machado de Assis, historiador (2003), about the literature and political ideas of the most important nineteenth-century Brazilian novelist, and co-edited five other books on the social history of Brazil. His most recent monograph is A força da escravidão: ilegalidade e costume no Brasil oitocentista (2012), on illegal enslavement and the precariousness of freedom in nineteenth-century Brazil. Chalhoub has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan (1995, 1999, 2004), a Tinker Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago (2007), and a research fellow at Stanford University (2010-11) and in the International Research Center “Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History” (Re:work) at Humbold Universität, Berlin (2013). He was a founder of and remains associated with the Centro de Pesquisa em História Social da Cultura (CECULT), University of Campinas.

Event organized by the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center