Isabela Fraga

fraga@uchicago.edu
MW 5:30-6:30 & by appt.
Cohort Year: 2016
Advisor(s): Agnes Lugo-Ortiz

Bio: Isabela Fraga holds a BA in Journalism and an MA in Media and Cultural Studies, both from the Rio de Janeiro Federal University, Brazil. Her research focuses on literatures and cultures of slavery of Latin America and the Caribbean, with a specific anchoring in critical race studies, affect theory, and the medical humanities. Her dissertation, titled Subjected to Feeling: Slavery and Personhood in Nineteenth-Century Brazil and Cuba, traces a century-long genealogy of writings concerned with the affective lives of enslaved and free people of African descent in the two most lucrative coffee- and sugar-producing regions of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Grounded in close readings of printed and archival sources from Cuba, Brazil, Spain, and Portugal, her project shows not only how colonial and imperial authorities were deeply invested in imagining the inner lives of those they enslaved, but also how Africans and people of African descent responded to such an investment.

Research interests: Eighteenth- and nineteenth- century intellectual production in Brazil and Cuba; slavery; history of medicine; affect theory; cultural studies; theories of diaspora; postcolonial studies

Dissertation: Subjected to Feeling: Slavery and Personhood in Nineteenth-Century Brazil and Cuba

Recent Courses in RLL
  • PORT 12200 Portuguese for Spanish Speakers (Spring 2019)
  • SPAN 10300 Beginning Elementary Spanish III (Winter 2019)
  • SPAN 22520 Slavery as Metaphor in Latin America (Autumn 2020)