Latin American History Seminar: Luisa Coleta and the Capuchin Friar: Slavery, Salvation, and the Adjudication of Status (Havana, 1817)

Convener: Eduardo Posada-Carbo

Speaker: Rebecca J. Scott, University of Michigan

Rebecca J. Scott is Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. She studies slavery, emancipation, and citizenship in both Latin America and the United States. Along with Jean M. Hébrard of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris she co-authored Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Harvard University Press, 2012), which won the Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association, and has been published in Portuguese and in Spanish translations. She is currently completing a manuscript titled “No Safe Harbor,” tracing three nineteenth-century life histories that unfolded in the shadow of unlawful enslavement. Her recent essays include “Social Facts, Legal Fictions, and the Attribution of Slave Status,” in the Law and History Review (2017); and, with two Brazilian colleagues, “How Does the Law Put a Historical Analogy to Work? Defining ‘A Condition Analogous to that of a Slave’ in Modern Brazil,” in the Duke Journal of Constitutional Law and Public Policy (2017).