Faculty

Celso T. Castilho
Research Assistant Professor Of History

PhD, UC Berkeley, 2008

Modern Latin American, with emphasis on Brazil; comparative slavery and abolition; culture, politics, and society in the ninetenth century. 

Telephone:  615-322-9370
Email:  celso.t.castilho@vanderbilt.edu
Office Hours: R 9:00-11:00 am, by appointment
Office: 118 Benson Hall

Celso Castilho is a Research Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His research and teaching focus on Latin America and the Caribbean, with an emphasis on Brazil, the nineteenth century, and the African Diaspora in Latin America. Currently, he is at work on a book manuscript entitled Remaking Nation and Citizenship in Northeastern Brazil: The Politics of Antislavery in Pernambuco, 1866-1893. His work analyzes the dynamics and effects of antislavery mobilization on the politics of slave emancipation, and examines the creation and ramifications of an “official” memory of abolition in the early years of the old republic. Through the lens of Pernambuco, the book also explores transformations in the meanings of nationhood and citizenship over the late nineteenth century, linking these shifts to a new language and style of politics cultivated by the abolitionist movement. Broadly, Remaking Nation and Citizenship offers a regional perspective on the major political changes in Brazil from the Paraguayan War and the late 1860s through the proclamation of the Republic and the early 1890s.

Celso Castilho is author of “Brisas atlánticas: la abolicíon gradual y la conexíon brasileña-cubana,” in Haití: Revolucíon y emancipacíon, eds. Rina Cáceres and Paul Lovejoy (San José: Editorial UCR, 2008), 128-39, and has an article (co-written with Camillia Cowling) forthcoming in Luso-Brazilian Review, “Funding Freedom, Popularizing Politics: Abolitionism and Local Emancipation Funds in 1880s Brazil.” In addition, he has reviewed books for Luso-Brazilian Review and Social History, and contributed entries on the “Abolitionist Movement in Brazil” and “Maria Firmina dos Reis” to The Encyclopedia of Free Blacks and Free People of Color in the Americas.

He is in the preliminary stages of two other book-length projects, both of which evolve from interests in antislavery and political history. 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 within the Luso-Atlantic world, analyzing how these themes interconnected Brazil, Portugal, and Angola between the 1880s and 1910s.

In 2009-2010, Professor Castilho will teach a lecture course on the history of Brazil and an upper-division seminar on Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, structured comparatively around the case studies of Peru, Brazil, and Cuba. In addition, he will offer the survey course on Modern Latin America in Spring 2010. In past years, his course teachings also include a seminar entitled “Comparative Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean.”
 
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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