Isadora Moura Mota

Isadora Moura Mota is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Princeton University. She is a historian of slavery in Brazil and the Atlantic world. Her scholarship focuses on modern Brazilian history, comparative slavery, abolitionism, literacy, and the African diaspora to Latin America. Mota’s first book, Freedom’s Horizon: Black Abolitionism in Nineteenth-Century Brazil, explores the role of Afro-Brazilians in shaping the history of abolition in the Atlantic world. The study traces the development of a geopolitical imagination among the enslaved as well as the escalation of black activism in connection to British efforts to suppress the slave trade, the U.S. Civil War, and the Triple Alliance War (which pitted Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay against Paraguay from 1864 to 1870). Ultimately, she argues that abolitionism was also a grassroots movement anchored in the social and conceptual lives of slaves, recaptives, freed peoples, and quilombolas, therefore positing Brazil as an important force in the Age of Emancipation. The book is under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press. Future research directions include an intellectual history of Afro-Brazilians centered on how they acquired, practiced, and gave meaning to literacy as well as a study of shared labor struggles between European colonists and the enslaved in the plantations of Southeastern Brazil.