Keila Grinberg

I am a Professor of Brazilian and Latin American History and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. A historian of nineteenth-century Brazil and the Atlantic world, my research focuses on slavery, abolition, gender, legal history, citizenship, and the histories of race and freedom. In addition to my scholarship, I am committed to public history and to bringing historical research to broader audiences through digital initiatives, exhibitions, documentary collaborations, and public engagement.

My scholarship examines how enslaved and free people used legal institutions to contest slavery and claim rights, situating 19th-century Brazilian experiences within broader Atlantic and comparative perspectives. My current research focuses on 19th-century slavery in Brazil, abolition, and the lasting impacts on collective memory and contemporary politics. I am currently working on three research projects:  the book manuscript Slave Soil, Free Soil: Illegal Slave Trade, International Relations, and the Paraguayan War, a social history of slavery and international relations in South America between the 1750s and 1870s, in which I analyze slave flights, small revolts, kidnappings and illegal enslavement of free women and their children in the Southern border of the Brazilian Empire and it’s impacts on the outbreak of the Paraguayan War (1864-70). The second project investigates savings accounts owned by enslaved people in nineteenth-century Brazil and their implications for contemporary debates about slavery's economic legacies. The third explores the intertwined histories of slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and historical memory through the life of André Pinto da Silveira, the grandfather of the prominent Brazilian abolitionist André Rebouças.

A defining feature of my career is the integration of historical research with public history. I am a co-founder and co-director of the public digital research network Passados Presentes: Memória da Escravidão no Brasil (Past Presents: Memory of Slavery in Brazil), an international collaboration between the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Latin American Studies and Brazilian universities. The network develops digital humanities projects, documentary films, educational resources, museum collaborations, community-based research, and memory tourism initiatives that make the history of slavery accessible to broader audiences, in partnership with Afro-Brazilian communities and cultural heritage organizations. Recently, I integrated the curatorial team of the exhibitions In Slavery’s Wake (Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and global partners, 2024-2028), Brasil Decolonial (Decolonial Brazil, 2022-2026), at Rio de Janeiro’s Museu Histórico Nacional; and curated the exhibit Senhora Liberdade: women defy slavery, at the National Archives in Brazil (2025-2026).