Harvard University, PhD '99

BIOGRAPHY

My research centers on inequality: what it is, how it is created and maintained, how people fight against it, and why it often proves so persistent, even in times of powerful social movements and seemingly radical legal and institutional change. Focusing mainly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Brazil and Latin America, I have explored these themes in relation to cities, citizenship, law, informality, the welfare state, race, slavery and its afterlives, and migration.

My first book, A Poverty of Rights (Stanford, 2008), examines how weak citizenship rights and residential informality shaped urban poverty, popular social struggles, and the political dynamics of inequality in modern Brazil. It received book awards from the Social Science History Association, the Urban History Association, the Conference on Latin American History, and the Brazilian Studies Association.

In various other books, articles, and chapters, I have expanded my focus on urban informality, tracing relationship to developmentalism, political liberalism, slavery, racial inequality in law and urban space, criminal law, internal migrations, and the relationship between the urban poor and Brazil’s political left. 

Cities from Scratch (coedited with Bryan McCann and Javier Auyero, Duke, 2014), explores the many ways in which poverty and informality have shaped the Latin American urban experience. My essay for the volume, "A Century in the Present Tense," explores the intellectual history of the informal city, showing how shacks and shantytowns have long served as avatars in political polemics that obscure their actual role in forging Latin America’s cities, societies, and cultures. 

Informal Cities: Histories of Governance and Inequality in Latin Europe, Latin America, and Colonial North Africa (co-edited with Charlotte Vorms, University of Chicago Press, 2025) globalizes and historicizes these themes, showing through vivid case studies that urban informality – defined both as a form of urbanism and a form of power – has a deep history that has been a crucial force in forging modern cities, inequalities, and systems of governance. My chapter focuses on how Brazil’s extensive urban informality can be understood as an afterlife of slavery.

My current work focuses on Brazilian slavery and post-emancipation and especially on how urban informality emerged as an extension of the power relations that sustained slavery’s cities. With Brazilian historians Keila Grinberg and Hebe Matos, I co-authored an article called "Law, Silence and Racialized Inequalities in the History of Afro-Brazil.” In The Boundaries of Freedom (Cambridge, 2022), Grinberg and I brought together many of Brazil’s leading social historians of slavery and its afterlives to introduce English-speaking audiences to the dynamic historiography of the western hemisphere’s largest slave society. My chapter “Slavery, Freedom and the Relational City,” focuses on how unfreedoms born of slavery continued to bind urban free and freedpeople during Brazil’s age of abolition.

I am currently finishing a new book called Intimate Inequalities, which tells the story of urban slavery and freedom through the daily lives and powerful social webs of Recife, a northeastern Brazilian city known simultaneously as the cradle of Brazil’s myth of racial democracy, the capital of Brazilian underdevelopment, and the incubator of Brazil's most innovative political, social and cultural movements. Through stories assembled from the noise and silences of wide-ranging, underexplored archives, the book shows how intimate relationships and social networks were the sinews of both power and struggle in Recife, at once enabling social change and limiting the emancipatory power of abolition, urbanization, and liberalism.  

My next project will explore the contemporary history of the right to the city in the intersecting and often conflicting realms of social theory, political activism, law, and grassroots politics. 

At Chicago, I am Faculty Director for the Global Studies Program and serve on boards or faculty advisory groups for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, CEGU, and the Democracy Core. I am also a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. Outside of the University, I currently serve on the editorial boards of Past & Present, as a corresponding editor for the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and the board of the Global Urban History Project.

My teaching and Ph.D. advising focus on the histories of cities, informalities, law, race, and slavery across the globe and on the broader histories of Brazil, Mexico, and Latin America. Before coming to Chicago, I taught at Amherst College and Northwestern University.