I am a social and cultural historian writing transnational and comparative history of the global African diaspora. I am a Full Professor of History at the historically black Howard University in Washington DC, United States. I was trained in Brazil, Canada, and France with a PhD in History and Social and Historical Anthropology (2007), a PhD in Art History (2004), an MA in History (1998), and a BA in Visual Arts (1995).
My work explores the history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade and their present-day legacies, including the long history of calls for reparations for slavery and colonialism, as well as the memory, heritage, material, and visual culture of slavery. I write, speak, and publish in English, Portuguese, French, and Spanish and my work has been translated in Chinese, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, French, and Norwegian. I have lectured about the history of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, France, United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, and South Africa.
I am working on several book projects.
I am midway in writing a trade book provisionally titled The African Kingdom at the Heart of the World: A Global History of Dahomey, under contract with Penguin Viking.
I just finished the book manuscript The Power of Art: The World Black Artists Made in the Americas, expected to be out with Cambridge University Press in 2027. The book explores how enslaved and freed artists in the United States and Brazil drew on their knowledge of African arts to create magnificent artworks with clay, iron, fibers, wood, stone, and textiles, to survive, fight for freedom and build a world of their own in slave societies that profited from their work while often failing to recognize their artistry.
My work has been generously supported by fellowships and grants. In 2025, I was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and in 2024, I was one of the eight scholars in the United States who received the inaugural ACLS HBCU fellowship to work on this book project. In 2026, I was a Florence Gould Foundation Fellow at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. In 2023, I was a Getty Residential Senior Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, CA and in 2022, I was a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute of Advanced Study (funding provided by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation), Princeton, NJ. Other fellowships and honors a Senior Heinz Heinen Fellowship at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at Universität Bonn (Bonn, Germany) in 2025. In 2023, the Carnegie Corporation New York (now Andrew Carnegie Foundation) named me “Great Immigrant, Great American,” an annual list honoring the contribution of US naturalized citizens to democracy and America.
I published over fifteen edited and single-authored books.
My book Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery in the Americas (University of Chicago Press, 2024), was one the two 2025 finalists of the Museum of African American History Stone Book Award. A hemispheric and narrative history of slavery in the Americas, Humans in Shackles centers Brazil (the country that imported the largest number of enslaved Africans in the Americas), the African continent, slave resistance, and enslaved women. Humans in Shackles is a featured text in the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History Book Club. Its Portuguese translation, Acorrentados: Uma história atlântica da escravidão, will be published with Edições do SESC in Brazil in 2026, and a Spanish translation is on the way with Icaria Editorial (Barcelona) in the series Esclavitudes.
Other recent books are The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History (2017, 2023) translated in French as Réparations: Combats pour la mémoire de l’esclavage (XVIIIe-XXIe siècle) and published by Éditions du Seuil in 2025.
Since 2017, I have been a member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO “Routes of Enslaved Peoples” Project (former Slave Route Project), and am also an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, London, UK.
My opinion articles and reviews in English, French, and Portuguese appeared in Le Monde, Slate, the Washington Post, Times, Aeon magazine, Africa is a Country, Newsweek, The Conversation, History News Network, African Arguments, Intercept Brasil, among others. Media outlets in the United States, UK, Portugal, Canada, Brazil, Spain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands have also featured my work.
In 2023, I created the #Slaveryarchive Digital Initiative. Based on its own social media accounts on X, Instagram, and YouTube, the #Slaveryarchive Digital Initiative is intended to educate the public about the history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade and promote scholarship in this field via book talks on video, a podcast, book reviews, syllabi, and the #Slaveryarchive Book Prize.
My curriculum vitae is available HERE