Faculty

Celso T. Castilho
Research Assistant Professor Of History

PhD, UC Berkeley, 2008

Modern Latin American, with emphasis on Brazil; comparative slavery and abolitionism; nineteenth-century political and social history. 

Telephone:  615-322-9370
Email:  celso.t.castilho@vanderbilt.edu
Office Hours: By appointment; on leave 2008-09.
Office: Benson Hall 118

Celso Castilho is a Research Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He is a historian of modern Latin America, with research interests focused on politics and antislavery in nineteenth-century Brazil. Currently, he is working on a book manuscript about abolitionism in northeastern Brazil. Using the case study of Pernambuco, he analyzes the abolitionist movement’s effects on the process of slave emancipation, as well as, the ways that broad popular mobilization transformed the local practices of politics. His research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the UC Berkeley Graduate Division, and the Center of Latin American Studies at UCLA.

Celso Castilho is a contributor to The Encyclopedia of Free Blacks and Free People of Color in the Americas (forthcoming) and has presented papers at national and international conferences. He is in the preliminary stages of two other book-length projects, both which evolve from his interests in antislavery and political culture. The first is a biography of Maria Firmina dos Reis (1825-1917), the Afro-Brazilian schoolteacher from Maranhão who published Brazil’s first antislavery novel, Ursula, in 1859. The second deals with the interplay of antislavery and colonialism from a Luso-Atlantic perspective, analyzing how these themes connected Brazil, Portugal, and Angola between the 1880s and 1920s.
He teaches surveys on modern Latin America and Brazil, and will offer more specialized courses on Comparative Slavery and Atlantic Port Cities.

Celso Castilho was born in São Paulo, Brazil, and raised in Los Angeles, California. He received his BA in History from UC Berkeley, and an MA in Latin American Studies from UCLA.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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