Stanford Humanities Center
Margarita Lila Rosa (a former Mellon Fellow at the SHC) received her PhD from Princeton University from the Department of Comparative Literature with a graduate certificate from the Department African American Studies in 2021. Rosa’s research explores the legal and social history of hereditary slavery across the Spanish and Lusophone Americas. Her current research also explores the expansion of the carceral state in the late nineteenth century in California and Rio de Janeiro. Rosa uses newspapers, court records, pamphlets, and other materials to expand access to the gendered Black historical archive in Latin America and the Caribbean.
SHC Project
Archive of the Flesh: Fugitivity, Kinship, and Black Feminist Theory and Art in the Americas
This book project weaves Black Atlantic gendered archives of slavery and rebellion with contemporary visual art to explore how Black traces on Atlantic soil and water indicate Black femme survival. Using the gendered body as a point of referent, this book project examines other bodies, such as bodies of water, archipelagos, and islands, in search of ways that Black fungibility and porosity led paths towards Black aspirational futures.
