Popular Revolts, Citizenship and State Building in 19th Century Brazil

Date: 

Thursday, November 8, 2018, 12:00pm

Location: 

CGIS South, S050, 1730 Cambridge Street

Speaker: Monica D. Dantas, Ruth Cardoso Visiting Associate Professor, Columbia University; Associate Professor, Brazilian Studies Institute and Social History Graduate Program, University of São Paulo

Moderator: Frances Hagopian, Jorge Paulo Lemann Senior Lecturer on Government, Harvard University

Contrary to what has been repeated for the past decades, Brazil’s Second Reign was not an age of peace and tranquility. If historians have duly recorded the great number of rebellions and upheavals that rattled the country during the first half of the 19th century, only recently scholars have paid more attention to social-political movements that happened from the 1850s on. In this conference, I aim to analyze how the free and freed people involvement in rebellions, riots and seditions is crucial to the understanding of the experience of protests as directly related to Brazilian State building process and how the lower strata of society learned to fight for their demands as citizens of a representative constitutional Monarchy.

Monica Dantas has a B.A in History from the University of São Paulo (1993); a graduate degree (lato sensu) in Archival Organization (1997) from the Brazilian Studies Institute/ USP; she was a Scholar in Residence at Yale University (1999); received her Ph.D. in Social History from the University of São Paulo (2002); developed a Post-Doctoral Research at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa’s Law School (2012); and, since 2013, holds a Research Grant bestowed by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq, Brazil).She teaches undergrad and graduate courses on Brazilian History (19thcentury) – on Rebellions, Social History, Pol itical History and Research Methods concerning 19thcentury Primary Sources –, and has supervised many Thesis and Dissertations. Her current areas of research are:Brazilian Studies; Social History; Political History; Popular Rebellions; Legal History; Transnational History of Free-Masonry (Brazil-USA). She co-founded, in 2017, a Legal History Networkthat congregates more than 40 researchers from all over Brazil, and many international collaborators from the United States, Portugal, Spain, England and France. She has published several academic oeuvres: books, book chapters and scholarly articles.