My historical research focuses on the role of technology—and cultural ideologies behind technological developments—in shaping modern Brazil and its frontiers. My book manuscript titled “Flight of the Toucans: Aeronautics and Colonization in Brazil’s Frontiers” explores the role of science and technology, especially aviation, in the colonization of Brazil’s vast frontiers. It shows how popular culture, positivistic elites, and a technocratic state came together in an almost religious belief that aviation was a solution to many of Brazil’s problems, and that the technology’s ability to conquer large distances would integrate the country’s distant territories. These ideological notions about aviation shaped the very development of the technology in Brazil. The application of these technocratic solutions, the book argues, created a unique frontier, with distant locations connected primarily by air, and where flying was commonplace for indigenous peoples.

I have also written about what I call “guerilla technologies,” technical know-how and practices created by technicians and inventors at the margins of society and developed outside of, and often in conflict with, formal technologies and authorities. My forthcoming article “Fire in the Skies: Guerrilla Technologies, the Environment and Airspace in Brazil” (in Technology and Culture) explores this concept by following the history and contemporary practices of baloeiros, artisans mostly in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo who practice the illegal art of launching hot air balloons. I have also written and directed a documentary film about the cultural phenomenon of criminalized hot air ballooning in Brazil.

I also have a strong interest in digital humanities and its applications in research, teaching, and public history. I have developed an app called CuratAR that makes augmented reality accessible to a much wider public without any technical training. The app allows users to select target images, such as photographs or paintings in museum, or signage in historical sites, and add new information such as scholarly text, videos, photos and maps to be displayed over the real world in augmented reality. I am also currently working on a project to build an affordable device (under $50) for digitizing historical materials on the field. It is tentatively called the “Pocket Archivist” and it will be used to crowdsource the preservation of historical materials in community or personal archives, or to affordably digitize historical collections that might be at risk of destruction.

As a strong believer in the importance of public scholarship, I was a co-founder and managing editor of The Appendix: A Journal of Narrative & Experimental History, which created a new forum to bridge the gap between academic and popular publishing for the humanities—bringing academics from different fields together with artists and journalists to produce high quality history writing for broad audiences. The Appendix reached over a million readers, and its articles have been featured by major publications such as The New Yorker, National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, The Atlantic and The Paris Review.

Arielle Crook graduate from the Stone Center with an M.A. in May 2020. She attended Xavier University of Louisiana as a pre-medical student and earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Biology in 2018. Throughout her travels to countries, such as Haiti, Costa Rica, Cuba, and Brazil, Arielle developed her unique understanding of global citizenship, holistic wellness, and the various religious traditions of the African diaspora. As a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) scholar, Arielle used her time at the Stone Center to explore the various uses of plants and other healing modalities in African-derived religions in Brazil while utilizing her skills as a visual and movement artist to engage with her international and local communities. In her thesis, “At the Intersection of Health, Healing, and Justice: Analyzing the African Botanical Legacy in Brazil,” Arielle uses an ethnobotanical lens to explore the various uses of plants as medicine. Her work raises questions regarding the political definitions of health and justice for Afro-descendants in Brazil, thus unearthing narratives surrounding resistance, healing, and cultural continuity. She aspires to create a professional research career centered on creating bridges between people of the Africa diaspora through transatlantic dialogue to facilitate conversations based on healing through plant medicine, storytelling, and creative movement.

Rosie Click is a first-year student in the Latin American Studies MA program. She graduated from Tulane in 2019 with a BA in Latin American Studies and English, and a minor in Spanish. Her academic interests include Latin American and Latinx literature, Cuban and Caribbean Studies, and immigration studies. In the future, Rosie hopes to continue her studies with a Ph.D. in either Latin American Studies, History or English/Literature. In a post-COVID world, Cuba is the first place she’d like to visit!

For my dissertation, I researched the process of formulating, adopting, and implementing export promotion policies in Costa Rica. After publishing several articles based on this work, I then expanded it into a book, Gradual Economic Reform in Latin America: The Costa Rican Experience (SUNY Press, 2001). In subsequent research, I turned to social policy, especially in the health sector, in Central America. As my research interests turned from Latin American political economy toward health policy so did my teaching and I developed courses on comparative health policy and global public health. Before leaving Tulane, I had begun work on mental health policy, first in Central America and later in Liberia, West Africa. In addition to research and teaching, I spent many years at Tulane in administrative positions.

My research focuses on the Atlantic world, exploiting the opportunity that Louisiana’s successive French, Spanish and US sovereignties affords to take a transnational and comparative approach that is less easily applied to spaces that remained subject to a single Atlantic empire. I have been especially interested in the intersection of race, religion and gender and have become increasingly engaged in the project of incorporating the history of non-Anglophone North America into the U.S. national narrative.

In my first book, the multiple prize-winning Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society: 1727-1834 (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2007), I trace the extensive impact of a transplanted European religious institution on the development of French and Spanish colonial Louisiana, particularly among enslaved and free African-descended people. The Ursuline mission sowed the seeds of a robust and enduring Afro-Catholic tradition in New Orleans. Conflict between French and Iberian Ursulines after the transfer of sovereignty from France to Spain in the 1760s reveals cleavages within New World Catholicism that had implications for education, social services and the experiences of enslaved and free African-descended people. The Ursulines introduced non-cloistered religious women to Spanish colonial America. When a number of New Orleans Ursulines returned to their native Havana after the Louisiana Purchase, they supplied Cuba with its first teaching nuns.

The deep engagement with archives in France and the U.S. that anchored Masterless Mistresses suggested that the long-standing trope of the city’s hypersexual, Orientalized free women of color was more a product of myth and political exigency than a historically grounded portrait of the women themselves. Conjured first in Saint-Domingue to explain the divided loyalties of white Frenchmen who failed to avert and suppress the Haitian Revolution, the figure of the mixed-race temptress who eschewed marriage and morality to become the transgressive mistress of a white man was transported to Louisiana along with refugees from Haiti. It took up permanent residence on the banks of the Mississippi and became symbolic of the entangled sins of slavery and sexual excess. Imaginatively quarantining the figure of the lascivious free woman of color in New Orleans allowed the rest of the United States to construct itself as morally and racially pure. My archival encounters with free women of color who married and became pillars of colonial and early national Catholicism in the city revealed the stark disjuncture between myth and history that is the subject of my second book, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World (University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

With Strange History I embarked on an engagement with the problem of the American historical narrative’s exclusion of the non-Anglophone roots of the nation. The commander of the Spanish colonial free black militia in New Orleans, Noel Carrière, emerged from the historical record as a compelling subject in the course of researching my second book. Born enslaved to an African father, Carrière attained his freedom thanks to the liberalized manumission laws that came to Louisiana with Spanish sovereignty. He later achieved high status as an officer of the Spanish colonial free black militia that fought on the side of the thirteen British mainland colonies in the American Revolution. Carrière was groomed by the first commander of Louisiana’s free black militia, a man who reenacted a fabled act of battlefield daring performed by an 18th-century Senegambian ruler. The commander’s act was baffling to the French soldiers who witnessed it, but communicated clearly and powerfully with the free black troops drawn from Louisiana’s Senegambian majority. Carrière’s richly documented life provides an unparalleled opportunity to write Africa, African-descended soldiers and Louisiana unambiguously into the American origin story. A 2020 completion is anticipated for Noel Carriere’s Liberty: From Slave to Soldier in Colonial New Orleans.

Offshoots of the interests reflected in my monographs inspired an edited translation of writing by French colonial religious women and two collected volumes, Women and Religion in the Atlantic Age, 1550-1900, with Mary Laven (Ashgate 2013) and New Orleans, Louisiana and Saint-Louis, Senegal: Mirror Cities in the Atlantic World, with Ibrahima Thioub and Cécile Vidal (Louisiana State University Press, 2019).

My teaching reflects my commitment to an interdisciplinary and transnational approach to Atlantic history and to the potential of digital humanities. In alternate years I offer a graduate course in Atlantic world historiography that has drawn Ph.D. students from Latin American studies, anthropology, Spanish and Portuguese, French and Francophone studies and architecture, as well as history. Two undergraduate seminars, “New Orleans Free People of Color” and “New Orleans and Senegal” engage students in the transatlantic, transnational and multi-racial history of New Orleans through primary sources, literature, material culture and art and culminate in final projects that are published on curated public history websites.

I am a past president of the Southern Association for Women Historians and have served on committees of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Southern Historical Association and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. My public service projects have included the organization of an international symposium commissioned by the city of New Orleans to mark its tricentennial in 2018 and collaboration with Columbia University on a national curriculum built around the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.