Stanford Humanities Center
Isabela Fraga received her PhD in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian studies at the University of Chicago. She 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.
SHC Project
Subjected to Feeling: Slavery and Personhood in Nineteenth-Century Brazil and Cuba
Fraga's research project, Subjected to Feeling: Slavery and Personhood in Nineteenth-Century Brazil and Cuba, traces a centurylong 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.
