# Sidney Chalhoub On Leave Academic Year 2025-26 Affiliate Professor, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures (Portuguese) ![sidney](/sites/g/files/omnuum8296/files/styles/hwp_4_5__480x600/public/2025-04/sidney.jpg?itok=D_qDx2sB) location\_on Robinson 212 smartphone [617-495-3551](tel:617-495-3551) email Office Hours: by appointment; preferably Wednesday 3–5 pm; Thursday, 2–4 pm Sidney Chalhoub taught history at the University of Campinas, Brazil, for thirty years. He moved to Harvard in July 2015. A social historian of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Brazil, his first monograph, *Trabalho, lar e botequim* (1986), is a study on working-class culture in Rio de Janeiro, based mostly on the analysis of homicide trial records. *Visões da liberdade* (1990) explores enslaved people’s petitions for freedom and other judicial cases to understand the role of the enslaved in bringing about the demise of slavery in Brazil. *Cidade febril* (1996) is a history of epidemics in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, focusing on public health policies regarding housing for the poor, on how race informed medical thinking, and on popular resistance to smallpox vaccination. *Machado de Assis, historiador* (2003) analyzes slavery, race, and the politics of literature in the work of the most important Brazilian novelist of all times. *A força da escravidão* (2012) investigates the practices of illegal enslavement and the precariousness of freedom in nineteenth-century Brazil. Chalhoub co-edited, with former students and colleagues, six volumes on different topics and approaches to the social history of Brazil: on how to read literature as a social historian; on Black thinkers and their critique of slavery and racial ideologies; on the political cultures of enslaved and “free” workers; on the arts of healing, medical and popular. He has recently edited, accompanied by detailed critical studies, two long-forgotten nineteenth-century books: *Fantina, cenas da escravidão*, by Duarte Badaró (first published in 1881; critical edition in 2019), which is a novel about the alleged social and legal seigneurial prerogative to sexually abuse enslaved women; *História e descrição da febre amarela*, by Pereira Rego (1851; critical edition, 2020), is a history of the first yellow fever epidemic in Rio de Janeiro told from the perspective of an author who fought against the disease as a medical practitioner and as a member of the city’s board of health. Chalhoub has supervised 31 completed doctoral dissertations, 23 master’s theses, and 30 senior theses. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, a Tinker Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago, and a research fellow at Stanford University and in the International Research Center “Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History” (Re:work) at Humboldt Universität, Berlin. He has served departments and university administrations in several capacities, perhaps most notably as director (1998-2008) of the [Arquivo Edgard Leuenroth](https://www.ael.ifch.unicamp.br/) at the University of Campinas, the most important archive of its kind for gathering materials on twentieth-century Brazilian social movements. He was a founder of and remains associated with the Centro de Pesquisa em História Social da Cultura ([CECULT](https://www.cecult.ifch.unicamp.br/)), University of Campinas. Chalhoub was chair of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) fact-finding delegation sent to Brazil to [report](https://lasaweb.org/uploads/brazildelegationreport-2017.pdf) on the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff (2016) and is currently president of the Brazilian Studies Association, [BRASA](https://brasa.org/). In a recent [interview](https://brill.com/view/journals/jgs/7/1-2/article-p225_14.xml) to the *Journal of Global Slavery*, he spoke about his trajectory as a historian of slavery. A selection of his publications in English appears below. “Rediscovering a Masterpiece in a New Translation: *The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas*, by Machado de Assis”, *Transition: The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora*, Issue 130, 2020, pp. 222-29. "The Great Fear of 1852: Riots Against Enslavement in the Brazilian Empire", in Ulbe Bosma e Karin Hofmeester, eds., *Marcel van der Linden: The Lifework of a Labour Historian*, Leiden, Brill, 2018, pp. 115-135. "The Legacy of Slavery: Tales of Gender and Racial Violence in Machado de Assis", in Lamonte Aidoo and Daniel F. Silva, eds., *Emerging Dialogues on Machado de Assis*, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 55-69. “The Politics of Ambiguity: Conditional Manumission, Labor Contracts and Slave Emancipation in Brazil (1850s to 1888)”, *International Review of Social History*, August 2015, pp. 161-191. “The Precariousness of Freedom in a Slave Society (Brazil in the Nineteenth Century)”, *International Review of Social History*, December 2011, pp. 405-39. “Illegal Enslavement and the Precariousness of Freedom in Nineteenth-century Brazil”, in John D. Garrigus e Christopher Morris, *Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World*, College Station, Texas A&M University Press, 2010, pp. 88-115. “The Politics of Silence: Race and Citizenship in Nineteenth-century Brazil”, *Slavery and Abolition*, vol. 27 (1), 2006, pp. 71-85. “Interpreting Machado de Assis: Paternalism, Slavery and the Free Womb Law”, in Sueann Caulfield, Sarah C. Chambers e Lara Putnam, eds., *Honor, Status and Law in Modern Latin America*, Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2005, pp. 87-108. “What Are Noses for? Paternalism, Social Darwinism and Race Science in Machado de Assis”, *Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies*, vol. 10 (2), 2001, pp. 171-191. "The Politics of Disease Control: Yellow Fever and Race in Nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro", *Journal of Latin American Studies*, vol. 25 (3), 1993, pp. 441-463. - ## Department Role [Faculty](/people/role/faculty) [Portuguese Faculty](/people/role/portuguese-faculty) - ## Language [Portuguese](/language/portuguese)