Research/Areas of Interest
Latin American Studies, Caribbean Studies, Affect Studies, Medical Humanities, Critical Race Studies, History of Psychiatry, Histories of Slavery
Education
- Doctor of Philosophy, University of Chicago, USA, 2022
- Master of Arts, Federal Univ of Rio De Janeiro, BRA, 2014
- Bachelor of Arts, Federal Univ of Rio De Janeiro, BRA, 2011
Biography
Isabela Fraga holds a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago (2022), with a specialization in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies. Her research and teaching explores issues of personhood, subjectivity, and language in the context of chattel slavery in Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean. Isabela's first book project traces a century-long genealogy of writings concerned with the affective lives of enslaved and free people of African descent in Brazil and Cuba, the two most lucrative coffee- and sugar-producing regions of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world.
Isabela is also a member of the Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture, an interdisciplinary and cross-university forum that explores images of slavery and the slave trade as well as the creation and use of images and objects by enslaved peoples and slaveholders. In particular, she is interested in the connections between photography, psychiatry, anthropology, and Afro-Atlantic religions in the decades immediately after abolition in Latin America and the Hispanic Caribbean.
Isabela is also a member of the Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture, an interdisciplinary and cross-university forum that explores images of slavery and the slave trade as well as the creation and use of images and objects by enslaved peoples and slaveholders. In particular, she is interested in the connections between photography, psychiatry, anthropology, and Afro-Atlantic religions in the decades immediately after abolition in Latin America and the Hispanic Caribbean.